There's no good reason we should have had that many in production. We had three versions of the 2.X series and two versions of the 3.X series because of mixing-and-matching base images we used plus management deciding that we could do partial upgrades of Python version by upgrading a project at a time. (We switched from 2 to 3, which meant we had containers -- with different base images -- where we updated the 2.X version but not the 3.X version and containers where we updated the 3.X version but not the 2.X version. This gave us all kinds of mixes and matches of Python 2/3 versions.)

So I just hoped whoever was maintaining base images was actually maintaining their security patches, kept the versions we were intentionally using up to date during container construction, and it (mostly) just sort of worked out.

We're down to... 3 versions of Python and 3 base images. I'm trying to get down to 2 versions of Python (a 2.X and 3.X).