Fix preflight check util

[eu9ene]

• fix config path
• make it compatible with earlier versions of python (we use a variety of python versions and there's no reason to make it incompatible)

[gregtatum]

Thanks for the fix! I'm a bit sad I can't use the new syntax here. Question: What's the story on our oldest version of python we support? Is there an opportunity to increase it to get access to newer language features?

[eu9ene]

Thanks for the fix! I'm a bit sad I can't use the new syntax here. Question: What's the story on our oldest version of python we support? Is there an opportunity to increase it to get access to newer language features?

It has to do with inconsistent environments we run this in (see #264). Ideally we should have just two docker images with everything installed (CPU and GPU ones, see also #391) that we can also run locally and have just one python version for everything. I see some of the prod tasks run with Python version: 3.10.12.

IMO in general new Python versions come out periodically and usually, they're not worth switching to unless you do some low-level Python optimization. All the new syntactic sugar doesn't help much with our problems. The bottlenecks we have are usually not in python but in IO, CPU/GPU, the amount of processed data etc. If say, there is a groundbreaking optimization in python that improves something like memory allocation 2x+, it's worth considering. For now I would even recommend downgraing poetry env to 3.10 to be consistent with production.

Also, I don't see a big difference in using switch syntax vs standard for python if else one.