> Does https://docs.python.org/dev/library/nntplib.html#nntplib.NNTP.description give the same result?

Not exactly same but descriptions give a similar result.

>>> import nntplib
>>> a = nntplib.NNTP('news.gmane.io')
>>> a.description('gmane.comp.python.committers')
'CPython Committers (non-public) (Moderated)'
>>> a.descriptions('gmane.comp.python.committers')
('215 Newsgroup descriptions in form "group description"', {'gmane.comp.python.committers': 'CPython Committers (non-public) (Moderated)'})
>>> a.xgtitle('gmane.comp.python.committers')
<stdin>:1: DeprecationWarning: The XGTITLE extension is not actively used, use descriptions() instead
('282 Descriptions in form "group description"', [('gmane.comp.python.committers', 'CPython Committers (non-public) (Moderated)')])