This has to be some kind of joke. If it had gone the other way and python had originally required people to write "except BaseException", a PEP to allow a bare except would be an obvious improvement to the language, since it would allow people to do the same thing and save pointless typing. This proposal is suggesting we break virtually all existing Python code to make the language objectively worse. I'm guessing this is a sort of "modest proposal" type parody.