For me, the locale.getlocale() function is broken. Python attempts to guess too many things about the current locale. For example, it relies on an hard coded locale.locale_encoding_alias dictionary which seems to come from X11!? In 2020, Wayland replaced X11 and locales are updated frequently. This dictionary makes no sense on Windows. For example, 'ka_ge' is mapped to 'ka_GE.GEORGIAN-ACADEMY': "GEORGIAN-ACADEMY" is not an encoding, what is the purpose of this string?

I fixed dozens and dozens of locale issues and I never ever used locale.getlocale(). I never understood its purpose nor how it guess the encoding.

I always use locale.setlocale(category) or locale.setlocale(category, None) which returns a simply string which I can pass back to locale.setlocale(category, string) to restore the locale, when I need to temporarily change a locale.