One place where this came up recently is in working out precisely how a Python-level subinterpreter API will interact with the threading API: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-September/149566.html

That said, I do agree with Tim that the status quo isn't broken per se: we renamed `thread` to `_thread` in Python 3 for a reason, and that reason is that you really need to know how Python's threading internals work to do it safely.

However, I do think we can treat this as a documentation enhancement request, where the `_thread` module docs could point out some of the requirements to ensure that low-level thread manipulation plays nice with the threading module.