This would be a change of behaviour, and 3.8 and 3.9 are in feature freeze, so we could only add it in 3.10.

You say:

"it's supposed to capture the output without holding references to real things"

Is this requirement documented somewhere, or is it just your preference?

"it makes comparison wrong for equivalent exceptions"

If the tracebacks are different, they're not exactly equivalent.

If we did accept this patch, would that mean there would no longer be any need to delete the exception variable at the end of an `except` block?