Your experience is probably in the minority of Python developers. There have been plenty of updates to popular packages + the core interpreter during that time,

Your experience is probably in the minority of Python developers. There have been plenty of updates to popular packages + the core interpreter during that time, updates to package/env managers (e.g. poetry). It's one thing if you're using python to solve projecteuler problems, but it's another if you're writing any full-stack code that has a variety of dependencies. It's great when you can set up a dev environment and then "forget" about it for some time, but 5 years is an exceedingly long time to not touch an env setup, and it implies that you are not really working with external dependencies, or too many other coworkers.