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Actually, what about the following ?

    def exists(path):
        return os.access(path, os.F_OK)

It returns True on all existing directory entries apart from broken links and links pointing within unreadable directories.

I don't see any similar nice solution for the more recent os.path.lexists()...  There are cases where the above exists() returns True but the current lexists() returns False, which is strange because lexists() is supposed to be a more permissive version of exists().