Grégory: good question.

I would personally advocate for doing it out of selfish interests. 

I'm working with middleware based on 3.8 (moving to 3.9+ is non-trivial), and we have a common fault scenario where the system breaks if logging.handlers.SysLogHandler is instantiated and the target host cannot be resolved, like seen in the first comment.

Backporting the changes you referenced would make addressing the above issue easier, since the logic in connect(..) was moved into its own routine.