Absolutely everything in CPython is a PyObject, and that can’t be changed without breaking the C API. A PyObject contains (among other things) a type pointer, a

Absolutely everything in CPython is a PyObject, and that can’t be changed without breaking the C API. A PyObject contains (among other things) a type pointer, a reference count, and a data field; none of these things can be changed without (again) breaking the C API. There have definitely been attempts to modernize; the HPy project (https://hpyproject.org/ https://hpyproject.org/), for instance, moves towards a handle-oriented API that keeps implementation details private and thus enables certain optimizations.