I reverted the changelog changes so this will cleanly backport, I'll handle the changelog and version update in a separate PR.

drivers-pr-bot please backport to v4.15

Sorry, unable to cherry-pick to v4.15, please backport manually. Here are approximate instructions:

1. Checkout backport branch and update it.

git checkout -b cherry-pick-v4.15-7a07c0281457f16fe807e4e65ef0c13f7b1deb2f v4.15

git fetch origin 7a07c0281457f16fe807e4e65ef0c13f7b1deb2f

2. Cherry pick the first parent branch of the this PR on top of the older branch:

git cherry-pick -x -m1 7a07c0281457f16fe807e4e65ef0c13f7b1deb2f

3. You will likely have some merge/cherry-pick conflicts here, fix them and commit:

git commit -am {message}

4. Push to a named branch:

git push origin cherry-pick-v4.15-7a07c0281457f16fe807e4e65ef0c13f7b1deb2f

5. Create a PR against branch v4.15. I would have named this PR:

"PYTHON-5544 Revert changes to base protocol layer (#2535) [v4.15]"

so much for that idea...