You could do things correctly in Python 2, but as soon as you used any third-party library in your project, chances were it is going to explode underneath you a

You could do things correctly in Python 2, but as soon as you used any third-party library in your project, chances were it is going to explode underneath you anyway. In the early 2000s, I maintained an py2, wxPython app with the users having the system encoding win-1250; the effort to patch this was unbelievable. The migration to python3-style handling forced everyone to think about these issues, not just few people for which things were crashing. Even just popularizing the issue was great, until then, many maintainers of third-party libraries didn't even understand what is the problem that you want to "needlessly complicated" fix in their libs.