personally I think they should be reverted -- they were not committed in spirit with the backwards compatibility policy: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0387/#making-incompatible-changes - I don't think they were discussed thoroughly, and when opposition was presented it was not listened to thoroughly: https://github.com/python/importlib_metadata/pull/278 - the change significantly complicates importlib.metadata with lots of sneaky types (they all look like builtin types but do not act like them) - it simultaneously introduces new apis and old apis which will both be around for extended periods of time but immediately moves to DeprecationWarning - the new apis aren't remarkably better than the old apis -- the motivation was written as "typing issues" but without citing actual issues. in fact, the new items are significantly more complicated to type properly - the change breaks many significantly important projects, from perusing related issues it's at the very least flake8, pandas, virtualenv, astropy, pytest, hypothesis -- and hundreds more from a quick github code search