mypy error with ViewList in sphinx extensions

[samtygier-stfc]

Summary

A recent update to types-docutils (from 0.20.0.20240311 to 0.20.0.20240314) has added typing to ViewList. ( python/typeshed@a1bfd65 python/typeshed#11469 ). We also recently turned on mypy typing for 3rd party types, so are getting the following errors

docs/ext/release_notes.py:30: error: Need type annotation for "rst"  [var-annotated]
docs/ext/release_notes.py:56: error: Argument 2 to "nested_parse_with_titles" has incompatible type "ViewList[Any]"; expected "StringList"  [arg-type]
docs/ext/operations_user_doc.py:84: error: Need type annotation for "rst"  [var-annotated]
docs/ext/operations_user_doc.py:91: error: Argument 2 to "nested_parse_with_titles" has incompatible type "ViewList[Any]"; expected "StringList"  [arg-type]

This is because ViewList is a generic container.
https://github.com/python/typeshed/blob/a1bfd65e9fa92e1bb61a475c7622ba0376d936d5/stubs/docutils/docutils/statemachine.pyi#L114

mypy can only infer the type if the generic type is used in the constructor. This is unlike built in containers, which can infer from the constructor or a method call

l1 = [1]
reveal_type(l1) # -> Revealed type is "builtins.list[builtins.int]

l2 = []
l2.append(1)
reveal_type(l2) # -> Revealed type is "builtins.list[builtins.int]"

For custom classes this does not work python/mypy#13134

T = TypeVar("T")
class MyContainer(Generic[T]):
	def set(self, x: T):
		self.item = x

mc = MyContainer()
mc.set(1)
reveal_type(mc) # -> Revealed type is "custom_class.MyContainer[Any]

Steps To Reproduce

Expected Behaviour

Current Behaviour

Context

Failure Logs

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