[njharman]

No, it's awesome.

It makes "morphing code", such as decorators easier to write. It's explicit. It's consistent (with class methods for instance). And it's not some special case magic with special syntax. It's just another parameter.

Python's great strengths is avoiding special case magic. Much more than many people realize as there's lots of syntactic sugar on top of double underscore functions and interfaces like context manager and generators.