Usually it is not the patch version being important eg being specifically 3.9.7, but rather picking one supported version and pinning it. Yes we should all be o

Usually it is not the patch version being important eg being specifically 3.9.7, but rather picking one supported version and pinning it. Yes we should all be on the latest Python version that is available in the mainline repos and distros as a binary but a lot of orgs I’ve seen don’t invest the time and effort to properly be upgrading to be on the latest version of deps. So you are usually having one specific supported Python version that everyone builds against which may or may not be new enough to be in the official repo. I also imagine the scenario you mentioned causing a lock to a patch version. But I see this as just a normal steady state a lot of orgs drift to if not staying on top of version updates