windows and non-thread Pythons

One of the windows scons source files uses subprocess to run vswhere,
and it calls suprocess.communicate.  This is new code and seems to be
working fine as far as I know.

Another source file calls a vcvars* batch script, and does not use
subprocess.communicate, with the following comment:

    # Use the .stdout and .stderr attributes directly because the
    # .communicate() method uses the threading module on Windows
    # and won't work under Pythons not built with threading.

Is that a Thing any longer? Windows Pythons not built with threading? Or
is this a special-case that can be eliminated?