Yeah, some weird accusations. Python has had classes since its inception (1.0).

Also the image in the post makes no sense. It shows multiple (Spidey) instances all pointing to each other which is not how self works. self is just a parameter that may contain different instances depending how it was called. This is also true for any other parameters in any function, each time a function is called it may have a different instance.

You don’t reference self when calling a method, what on earth are you talking about? You start with the instance when calling the method, like most/all other OOP languages.

Also there are benefits with the explicit self/this to access instance properties. In C++ you need to make sure all class properties/members have a naming scheme that does not conflict with potential parameter names or other names of other variables.