Sometimes I think anti-recommendations (e.g. asyncio) are far more useful. You don't learn a lot from many open source libraries or standard library modules if you try to imitate them. You must understand that this code is a compromise, then they stuck with it for compatibility reasons, and today you could have a much better API or simpler implementation if you started from scratch.
But that’s true for code that was written yesterday too. All code makes compromises and has to deal with constraints. Understanding what someone did given their lot is still valuable.
