> This is a fallacy.

What fallacy? I was responding to "does anyone else have opinions on this?" I can't read minds of people all over the world, so I have to go by my best guess, which is based on how many times this issue has been reported before - which I believe is zero.

> It's also assuming you have seen and remember every single bug report related to this from the past 16 years which, nothing personal, seems incredibly unlikely given how poor humans are at remembering things in the first place.

Feel free to do a search on here to see if you can find an earlier issue about this.

> I'm presuming to speak for end-users yes, why not? 

Because they're a very diverse bunch who don't all speak with one voice. I, too, am a user (of other people's code) as much as a developer. I don't see things the same way as you do, here, and it's not because it's my code. I'd probably feel the same way if you'd pointed to some other instance of Python code which does the same kind of thing.

There are numerous examples in the stdlib where None is passed in and some other value (e.g. 'utf-8' for an encoding) are used as a default, without that value appearing in any documented argument list.