I think there are two counterargument to leaving things alone.

1. The reason for the specialized checks is to change behavior when the test fails, to give more informative error messages. So the change is not purely cosmetic or stylistic. I believe there was a recent case where assertTrue(a == b), a and b strings, had to be changed to assertEqual(a, b) to find out why the assert failed. As I remember, nothing else in the test file obviously needed changing and it would not have been touched otherwise.

2. People adding tests may not review existing tests for modernization.

That said, it *is* possible to ignore 2. and not worry about 1. until a test fails. And I agree that the original patch is too much to review.