Several unit tests fail with the following error: AttributeError: module 'numpy' has no attribute 'float'.
Deprecated since 1.20, these aliases are now removed from new numpy releases (numpy/numpy#22607).

Two step plan:

• fix numpy<1.24 for subsequent 1.3.x releases.
• update the code base and bump the minimum required version of numpy in the same release that we bump to Py3.9+