If you’re reading this, please don’t submit your coworkers to __post_init__ just write normal code, nobody cares is you have some sort of crazy justification, nobody extending that shit.
It's basically there because of dataclasses, we use it all the time.
Python painted itself into a corner when they came up with a clever way to auto generate __init__ implementations but then also sometimes you need to modify the auto generated implementation. I kind of like their solution relative to alternatives I've seen... C++ is the worst offender to my mind in this case, because it has extremely complicated auto generation rules and the moment you want to do something special, you are now writing two dozen lines of code to make up for the fact that you got in the way of the auto-gen logic.
Python painted itself into a corner when they came up with a clever way to auto generate __init__ implementations but then also sometimes you need to modify the auto generated implementation. I kind of like their solution relative to alternatives I've seen... C++ is the worst offender to my mind in this case, because it has extremely complicated auto generation rules and the moment you want to do something special, you are now writing two dozen lines of code to make up for the fact that you got in the way of the auto-gen logic.