I would agree with his approach, but unfortunately the Python community has encouraged, to some extent at least, the use of implicit "truthiness" to do things like check for None, rather than explicit checks.
I think it's more likely just a bad habit that some people may have picked up when using PHP or JavaScript, and mistakenly continued using after moving to Python.
PEP 8 (http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#programming-reco...) is quite clear about this:
"Comparisons to singletons like None should always be done with is or is not, never the equality operators.
Also, beware of writing if x when you really mean if x is not None -- e.g. when testing whether a variable or argument that defaults to None was set to some other value. The other value might have a type (such as a container) that could be false in a boolean context!"
PEP 8 is more representative of the actual Python community's views than the mistakes of some programmers who are more accustomed to certain languages that are not Python.