I really feel like the community was a difficult pain in the ass during the 2->3 migration. There were breaking changes but I’m sure the Python maintainers didn’t expect the community to react so badly.
Are there some valid reasons that made 2->3 migration insanely hard for some projects? I remember seeing blog articles whining about print vs print(), but surely there are some more important stuff.
Guido has done some pycon keynotes in the recent past and said himself he takes some of the blame for the transition. He says he greatly underestimated the impact of breaking changes and the inertia to get the community to change code. In particular not shipping tools to help automate the migration, or even thinking through a migration path with targeted backwards compatibility/back ports from the start (these eventually came quite a few releases and years into the transition). I don't think it's fair to say the community was entirely at fault for the length of time.
edit: This talk he did from pycascades 2018 in particular I remember seeing and being a good retrospective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oiw23yfqQy8
Codemods aren't a thing in Python?
What is a "codemod"?
The name originates from an internal script at Facebook called codemod. It had a public open source fork if you are curious.