Yes, but it's unsafe for another reason. The new syntax can be verified statically by tools like Pylint. A call to locals() is hard to verify.

The locals() function itself could for instance have been replaced by something else. When using locals(), you won't know until execution time if a local variable, required for the interpolation is missing. Even worse, linter tools (pylint, pyflakes, jedi, ...) are now going to tell you that certain variables are not used, and people are going to remove it without thinking that somewhere a locals() call is going to use it. This is very bad. Actually, the effects of using locals() cannot be verified statically, even more because locals() is also a writable dict.

For f-strings, the name bindings are static, and editors are going to understand it while editing.