Though there was a developer who was forced to quit a while ago.
Until the "cool kids" started meddling, it was a lovely village. It had a strong focus on beginners and teachers.
Some of the clique have been fired later and now CPython is basically a hollow shell with some corporate projects still going on.
Back then it felt like a bit of a club, one that forms around a common hobby. Nowadays it feels more like the "community" of a high-school graduation class. Sure there is community there, but its mostly one of folks randomly thrown together into classrooms.
Folks like Raymond Hettinger would today be totally drowned out in the listicle-style attention seeking times.
> in the web world
I would put that more broadly though, it was web, data-science, there was a point when it became the universal scripting language, and part of me kind of hoped that the crowd would move to nodejs for all of it, so that Python can become more peaceful again. But I guess there is no going back, we went from dinghi to cruise ship, and when the crowd leaves, it will just be a deserted cruise ship.
The point is that, unlike in the Bitcoin block size debacle, you don't have people who are pulling in different directions because it directly impacts their bottom line if Python does X or Y. There's no one who particularly profits from there being a GIL.
The Python community is welcoming, many come for the language and stay for the community. It's not, of course, free of politics or drama, but it's very far from what you describe. Local communities are very strong, CPython core community seems to always be trying to improve to me.
Even Tim Peters, who I really hope is part of the documentary, is an enthusiastic participant, both helping with gnarly CPython issues and providing assistance to newbies.
If you look at the Fellows list[0], you can see that many important names aren't active in the community anymore (I don't know the reasons for each one), but many more are either active or in (very) good terms with the community.
The CoC was and is a net positive, the diversity efforts even more so. Last Saturday I was at a local Python conference and the local community has welcome both, to great success and improvement.
Nobody is pro-GIL per se. But a lot of people were pro-No-Single-Threaded-Performance-Desegregation. The first GIL-removal patch was submitted all the way back against python 1.4, and regular attempts have been made ever since, but it wasn't possible to remove the GIL without making the single threaded performance of existing python code worse, so Guido and co. refused to accept them.