That’s probably true. I do think part of the anger is that a lot of the changes didn’t clearly improve the code around it. The obvious example is the change to print from a statement to a function. It makes the language a little cleaner, but it also breaks existing code for little practical benefit. More insidious was the breaks with strings and byte strings. It was a good and necessary change that also could lead to weird quiet breakages.

At least for me, the real blocker was broad package support.

Maintainers should think carefully about whether their change induces lots of downstream work for users. Users will be mad if they perceive that maintainers didn’t take that into account.