All these subtleties and gotchas signify, to me, a shit implementation and a fragmented interface. The exact opposite of the Zen of python.
Zen of Python is an illusion. Complex things are complex, there’s simply no way to have an interface that’s always clean, useful, and maintainable.
"Beautiful is better than ugly." Requests is more beautiful than urllib2.
"Simple is better than complex." Trio is simpler than asyncio.
"Readability counts." Python is more readable than C++.
"There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." ''.join(strings), not sum(strings, '').
Note what isn't in the Zen of Python: performance, close-to-the-metal-ness, correctness, portability.
Python often fails to live up to its values, but that doesn't make them meaningless.
But even without docs I understood it faster than asyncio and it is more pleasant to use.
Twisted is very elegant, but somehow elegant things get eradicated in the Python world. Time and again.
Don't get me wrong, python is a lovely language when the universe aligns perfectly. But buggy libraries with fragmented interfaces are everywhere in the python community, and any zen that could have been had by pythons expressiveness gets obliterated by the various other warts and faults of the ecosystem. It's just a tool, not a form of enlightenment.
I think the confusion comes about because many people use Tao and zen interchangeably. The Tao is supposed to represent a total understanding of the underlying universal principals, which can be seen as a form of enlightenment.
However Zen is not that.
The zen of python would represent a way to meditate while coding in python. Though I will admit the actual document reads more like a Tao, and it was originally called “the way of Python” (Tao also translates as the way).