That was a bit abrupt, want't it?  Denver is well aware of this and said: 
"but sometimes using the context manager approach adds unnecessary bloat to already long-winded unit tests."

I happen to agree with him and don't see why we can't discuss this some.  We never did discuss this fully in issue 6275, I just tempered my patch a bit to at least get something done.

I don't think this should be rejected out of hand simply because TBDFL said that its an "'odd' API for a unittest assert method".  assertRaises already return a context manager if called without a callable (an odd api?), and it can just as well return an exception if called _with_ a callable.