A lot of that is simply formula authors / application devs who don't know what they're doing (python@3.10 and other versions are a thing, and have been for quit

A lot of that is simply formula authors / application devs who don't know what they're doing (python@3.10 and other versions are a thing, and have been for quite a while now, but they're not always used and devs don't always keep track of the version they need) and people not updating their software for years (pythons are on a 5 year cycle everywhere, homebrew included: https://devguide.python.org/versions/ https://devguide.python.org/versions/ and https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/python@3.10 https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/python@3.10 ). Python in particular is well known to not be a stable target. For anyone. By design. If you expect long term use of a specific version of code, use a different language. It is not at all homebrew's fault that they're how many people discover that.