Also @jakevdp, mltypes will notice this. The updates should be very easy though (see release notes or rational changes here).

I would like to push this through very soon, though. Without this there is absolutely no way we might make itemsize an intp or add new flags in a reasonable way, and I think the changes required are simple.
(And however we do it exactly, prepare for bit-sized dtypes, which is asked for surprisingly often, even if ndarray can't store them directly due to byte strides.)

Rebased and added the alias also to the compat header. I will merge this once tests pass since Nathan said it looks good and it is just a bit nicer to work off main.