To be clear, such a request doesn't even mean that someone is consciously attempting to kill the project (although in the corporate world, ime it probably does). It just means that something went critically wrong. In this case, it appears like python's development process really required a PEP for this sort of work, especially since it was happening on the main branch.
>> For example, rather than proposing one single concrete JIT implementation, it may make more sense for the PEP to describe a JIT infrastructure that can support multiple implementation strategies.