I've been looking into this further, and a reproducer that's independent of assertRaises() is to just bind the function to a local variable name in an outer function:

    def outer():
        callable_obj = f
        try:
            callable_obj()
        except Exception as exc:
            return exc

That should make it easier to test a basic recursive "clear_all_frames" operation like:

    def clear_all_frames(exc):
        cause = exc.__cause__
        if cause is not None:
            clear_all_frames(cause)
        context = exc.__context__
        if context is not None:
            clear_all_frames(context)
        traceback.clear_frames(exc.__traceback__)