Comment 4 for bug 1910175

The correct way to check for the python version is to figure out the major version (here 3.8) by looking at python3, and then looking at python<major>, here python3.8.

The versions are not matching in other releases either, e.g. bionic has defaults 3.6.5/3.6.7, but python3.6 is at 3.6.5/3.6.9. xenial has 3.5.1 default, 3.5.2 python3.5.

This is normal and expected; changing it would not do anything useful, just trigger a ton of autopkgtests.