> For a recent example of change releasing the GIL, see bpo-32186 which has been backported up to 2.7.

Playing Devil's Advocate here: yes, but that was a far simpler and less extensive change.  bpo-32186 did not change configure.ac and pyconfig.h.in and I suspect that the impact of the old behavior that bpo-32186 was far more wide spread than that of bpo-33625 (stating files on a NFS file system versus doing getpwnam/getpwuid's).  Also when Christian made his comment about a bug fix, the proposed PR was much simpler in scope.

I am not saying that we definitely should not backport to 3.7 but I don't think it is an automatic call as the PR now stands.  In any case, we should first get the fix into master and get some exposure there before deciding whether to backport.