Aye, I agree that changing the default resolves the feature request here. I've recategorised this as a documentation issue, as the initial PR only changed the `tarfile` documentation, so the impact on `shutil` isn't obvious.

So the changes needed will be:

* add a "What's New" entry for shutil, noting that shtuil.make_archive inherited the change in default archive format from tarfile
* corresponding "version changed" note in the shutil.make_archive documentation


An addition to the "Porting" section in What's New may also be needed, depending on how tarfile.Tarfile behaves if you tell it to open a PAX_FORMAT archive using GNU_FORMAT or vice-versa (tarfile.open and shutil.unpack_archive will be fine, since they query the file's own metadata to find out which format to use)