I don't think so. Five years ago a lot of the community wasn't ready and it probably would have resulted in the community splitting in two.

Now many important libraries have already moved to being Python 3 making the whole Python 2 ecosystem feel frozen.

Likely the case. A lot of foot dragging took place. By five years ago most things of use were py3, conversion was easier than ever (and easy enough).

More importantly, it would have stopped piles and piles of bleakly futured py2 codebases being written. That people were still writing new py2 code five years ago is terrible, and the long sunset is certainly greatly at fault here.

That people are still writing new py2 code now is just criminal.

the RHEL vm's that I get at my job (enterprise IT) have python2 installed by default and no python3. It is much simpler to write scripts in python 2 (albeit written in a way to support forward compatibility with 3) because python2 is just there by default on every VM and its one less requisition order to write. We are actually upgrading to python 3 at the end of this month, but we lived with python 2 for a full year. Just want to make the point that "writing new py2 code now is just criminal" is a tad overzealous.

Well, it seems you were writing py3 code in py2, as much as was possible, so I wouldn't lump you in yo the criminal camp.

Not everywhere had that foresight.

I'm pretty sure Twisted(!) did not have Python 3 support 5 years ago.

Also, macOS _still_ only ships with Py2. If I'm writing a quick script for my girlfriend to make her life easier, should I target Python 3 and force her to learn how to install xcode so she can learn to use homebrew so she can install Python 3, or should I just target Python 2 and move on?

macOS says they’ll stop supporting scripting languages out of the box someday, so targeting Homebrew is probably best.