> What changed since http://bugs.python.org/issue2936?

Well for one thing, #2936 was a bug report ("behavior") but this is an enhancement request. It seems that if you don't know exactly what a library is called, you can't use find_library to locate it even if it happens to be on LD_LIBRARY_PATH - and if you don't have the name, you can't load it using cdll.LoadLibrary.

ISTM LoadLibrary wants the full library name (including extension, on Linux); find_library helps determine that in a cross-platform way (since you can just give it the stem of the library rather than the whole filename).