The version_info property is declared to be a length-4 tuple:

But it often has fewer values, which is intentional:

So the type annotation should be changed, but I am unsure what it should be changed to, whether any additional documentation should be added, and whether having fewer than some number of numeric fields should be treated as an error and cause an exception to be raised.

If the type annotation should reflect that only a few specific lengths are reasonable, then it could be expressed as a Union of specific-length Tuple types. Otherwise it could be expressed as a variable-length tuple by writing the type as Tuple[int, ...].

I recommend this be solved in such a way that the cast can be removed. Currently, the cast is working around ambiguity in how the return type is intended to be understood.

This is separate from #1829, though I noticed it while looking into that and they could possibly be fixed (or improved or otherwise closed) together.