@loved.by.Jesus: Yeah, they added optimizations for Python level method calls in 3.7 that were extended to C extension method calls in 3.8 by PEP 590 that remove the overhead of creating a bound method each time you call a method, so the cost to call alist.copy() is now a dict lookup on the list type, then a relatively cheap no-arg function call that ultimately invokes the same thing as slicing. More @Wikipedia
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