[misnome]

My immediate first thought is, optimisation? If you know you’ve been the same object, you could skip e.g. comparison, or change update logic

[dist-epoch]

This kind of micro optimizations don't make much sense in Python. They complicate the code, and you are still 100 times slower than compiled languages.

[misnome]

It really… doesn’t have to complicate. And I disagree that optimising python code is never necessary. Not everybody is writing 100-line one-off glue scripts.

Also, you are somewhat changing the topic from “what is an example of when you might want to is-compare two dicts”, no?