Op said thei got an old notebook, trying to run a VM on it would probably be a miserable experience. Depends on the exact model of course, but with low specs and potentially lower hardware support for VMs, its not likely to be a good solution.
Community in question has been eduring this for at least 4 years now. Id wager to say that taking matters into their own hands via activism and demanding change with whatever methods they can is a very good look actually.
This looks like a Jinja template, so definitely supposed so be populated by something else first. Yaml is basically just a prettier Json so it wouldn’t support something like that section on its own.
Pretty sure its not a PEP, but the python glossary mentions it. Searching ‘python EAFP’ brings up a lot of discussion on the topic too, so if nothing else its definitely a widespread phenomenon