could you review @crusaderky ?

LGTM

It would be good to have a short summary and such in the description of the PR. I assume people who discover that they can't use Python<3.12 anymore will find this PR and wonder "what the heck?" without one. Yes, we link to the issue where this was discussed but it is a long one, with back and forth, etc. So as a service to people from the future we should have a short summary here that explains why this change was made (not why this bug fix, but why drop support for old Python versions)

as a service to people from the future we should have a short summary here that explains why this change was made (not why this bug fix, but why drop support for old Python versions)

This may have to wait until after the meeting on Thursday, or whenever @ev-br is well and able to help. Personally I do not have good justification for dropping these versions instead of keeping __array__ around for a bit to support 3.10 and 3.11.

Of course feel free to write something yourself if you do have that justification @betatim .