From my opening comment (with new emphasis):

"I think it's the case that **some routes via the C API** now reject out of range values that were previously permitted."

The pywin32 repro I gave above eventually calls PyDateTimeAPI->DateTime_FromDateAndTime():

http://pywin32.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/pywin32/pywin32/file/85c1c99b1cb8/win32/src/PyTime.cpp#l980

AFAICT, under Python < 3.6.1 such out of range values were tolerated there. Under Python 2.7, for example, the datetime that results from this call is somewhere in 1899.

I am not claiming that these invalid values should be tolerated forever more, or that this was ever the correct behaviour, but I would have expected a backwards incompatible change like this to happen in, say, Python 3.7, rather than a maintenance release. (Particularly when it breaks a library that's practically standard on Windows.)