I remember first discussions about removing the GIL back in 2021 and a lot of initial confusion about what the implications would be. This is a great summary if, like me, you weren’t satisfied with the initial explanations given at the time.
You can find forum and Reddit posts going back 15-20 years of people attempting to remove the GIL, Guido van Rossum just made the requirement that single core performance cannot be hurt by removing it, this made ever previous attempt fail in the end
I.e. https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214235
The patches dropped some unrelated dead weight such that the effect is not as bad.
That is absolutely in the range of previous attempts, which were rejected! The difference here is that its goes in now to gratify Facebook.