When I am creating a new script with the command exit(), and run it inside Spyder, it kills the kernel instead of just stopping my script:
It seems the kernel died unexpectedly. Use 'Restart kernel' to continue using this console.
My workaround so far is to encapsulate the code into a main function and use return inside.
This is now upstream at https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/issues/1974 .