Documenting my opinion re "why" argument= style - until we have a high degree of coverage of type annotations (and even after that, since the type checker isn't all-the-time handy), the dynamic polymorphism / argument introspection / etc for python (and similarly, R) is a minefield for mis-specification / mis-understanding / mis-use of arguments.

For quick-and-dirty-one-off scripts, the polymorphic behavior is great(*until it isn't, but it is generally faster to write). For libraries, however, we want to avoid setting ourselves traps. Even one-argument methods might in the future be revised to have more or in a different order or ...etc. When comparing across diffs here, keeping the argument names makes it easier to grok what's happening.

To the extent that code feels noisy, verbose, ... - I agree, but the fix to that is better abstractions, not using syntax sugar likely to lead to a hard-to-find bug in future work.