TLDR: ArcPy Cursors do not universally respect Context Managers; Add Appropriate Methods to the Cursor Class to enable graceful exits (discard, disconnect, close) as part of the __exit__() call.
Recently an Esri blog was published detailing a relatively common "gotcha" pertaining to cursors applied against a file geodatabase: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-pro/data-management/locked-by-another-application-u...
The given solution was to embed a del call within a context manager (a with statement). This idea runs contrary to the syntactic sugar abstraction that is a context manager, or put otherwise, we use a context manager to not have to worry about some of the nitty-gritty of programming details like closing files and cursors. The suggested solution is problematic as it requires a user to have in-depth knowledge of what is likely an oversight due to the long-lived nature of the ArcPy library; further compounded by the lack of documentation outside of the blog's reference. https://realpython.com/python-with-statement/
This idea is to add in certain methods within the ArcPy Cursor Class to have it conform to the Python DBA Specification (https://peps.python.org/pep-0249/); while this sounds like a lot, in reality the additions would be fairly minimal and would be similar to the solution discussed in this blog post: https://dev.to/c_v_ya/sql-cursor-via-context-manager-2gc7
Having an implementation would make the ArcPy library more robust and allow the ArcPy Cursor to behave the same way regardless of the underlying data source-- --which would be the expectation for any other library, a function to behave the same way for all the inputs it is programmed to accept. This would benefit the users as they would not need to have an arcane understanding of a library that is possibly older than some of its users; they would be able to trust that ArcPy cursors comply with context managers which is a common usage pattern since Python 2.5.
