Incosistent use of Python versions

[mihirbala]

Need to decide on a unified Python version that our project supports; cannot use match statements if we want to support 3.8, which runs on many older machines and embedded chips

[jaharkes]

At this point, I believe, the recommended (consensus?) method seems to be to always install your python dependencies in a virtualenv. So for older machines the straighfoward solution is to use conda, pyenv or uv which all can install whatever python version you need in the virtualenv.