I’m very appreciative of that this was a difficult choice and that there was no way to make all groups of users happy. But one group of users I would like to bring up is users practicing number theory in Python using only the Python language and the standard library, not advanced third party libraries like sympy.
Because of the unbounded nature of Python integers and the very easy syntax to learn it has historically been a very low barrier to entry for such users. As this is now a new barrier it would be nice if in the release notes it very clearly stated how to disable this in the easiest possible way for such users, e.g. sys.set_int_max_str_digits(0).
Currently it took me ~15 paragraphs of reading from the release notes to the documentation, to subtopics in the documentation, to correlating the information with sys.int_info.str_digits_check_threshold to sys.set_int_max_str_digits. To me this seems like a much bigger barrier to entry than this group of users has ever faced before.