Those two references have nothing to do with your request.  They are talking about cycles that get created by grabbing the traceback variable, and the fact that it may take a while before garbage collection reclaims them *after you have let go of the traceback reference*.  You are talking about wanting to release the locals in the stack frame and still hold on to the traceback.  Completely different issue.

Note that while the standard traceback print doesn't reference the locals in the frame, extended tracebacks such as cgitb do.  There is also a proposal to add such locals printing to the standard traceback.

I'm pretty sure this issue isn't going to go anywhere without a patch proposal, but before you work on that you might want to raise the idea on python-ideas and see if a wider audience thinks it is a good idea.