> This will be the change to make "special" filenames only be 
> special when used on their own, and not as part of a path

For some reason, Windows 11 still reserves case-insensitive "nul" in qualified paths, but none of the other DOS device names. Thankfully it's just "nul", and not "nul.txt", since they changed it to never reserve a name with an extension. So "./nul" -> "\\.\nul", but "./nul.txt" resolve to the filename in the current directory.

For cases such as "./con" vs "con", this is another example in favor of changing ntpath.normpath() and pathlib.Path to preserve an initial leading dot component. Other cases include alternate data streams on single-letter filenames (e.g. accessing "C:stream" as "./C:stream") and executable paths that should explicitly refer to the current directory (e.g. "./spam.exe").