I think the 2/3 split had more impact than the author thinks.
Many people in my bubble (around 2013-2017) just never went with python 3, but chose other languages.
The company I was working for started important applications in python 2 as late as 2014 because the libraries we needed weren't ported yet. We never went python 3 later, but went to go instead, so we completely missed any python async thing.