Fair and accurate. But that’s pretty much what people use, right?

I am happy to hear stories of using pypy or something to radically improve an architecture. I don’t have any from personal experience.

I guess twisted and stackless, a long time ago.

The GIL is optional in new Python versions. Downsides are legacy library compatibility and degraded single thread performance.

I mentioned subinterpreters. That’s the thing that “makes the GIL optional,” you still have to use subinterpreters.

Is this no longer true?

It is no longer true. You can have free threading.