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Because people have deadlines and need to get things working. You read enough to figure out how to do what you need to do and then mostly move on.

This function was added in 3.7 with no note on the importance of saving a reference. In 3.9 a note was added "Save a reference to the result of this function, to avoid a task disappearing mid execution." which was then expanded with the explanation of a weak reference in 3.10.

It absolutely is common. People see there is a len function that takes one argument, they call len(some_collection), see that it indeed returns the number of items in the collection like they expect and move on. They don't expect len to return a negative number instead on Thursdays, and of course it doesn't because that would be a pretty big footgun. People also see that there is a create_task function that takes a coroutine, they call create_task(some_coroutine), see that the coroutine indeed runs like they expect, and move on. Sure, you're supposed to await the result, but maybe they don't need the awaited value anymore, only the side effects, and see that it still works.

I had a manager who actually told me not to read docs. I was a bad report and read them anyway.