Considering this has been deprecated since 3.3 and since all these versions have the alternative available, I think should just apply the deprecation to all supported versions. (We can be looser in the stubs than the implementation, as the stubs will only affect developers that run a type checker on the code, while the runtime deprecation will also be shown to users.)

all these versions have the alternative available

No, they don't:

Python 3.11.2 (main, Apr 28 2025, 14:11:48) [GCC 12.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import array
>>> array.array('w')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: bad typecode (must be b, B, u, h, H, i, I, l, L, q, Q, f or d)

Huh, it's unfortunate that the docs don't point that out ...

According to mypy_primer, this change has no effect on the checked open source code. 🤖🎉

I created python/cpython#137184 to fix the docs.