I think the techniques discussed here have value, pedagogical and otherwise. Perhaps one is working on a codebase where we don't have the luxury to move to pypy or similar (e.g., my current one which uses some incompatible libraries, so transition would be nontrivial).

The fact that that method accessors are much slower than properties, or that closures can speed things up, is something that we might not always be mindful of, and that new python programmers might not think through.