Thanks a lot Paul for your thoughtful reply. I will respond in more detail later but to avoid derailing the conversation here, I wanted to quickly note that you’ve identified an error in the draft where I referred to ‘named variables’ instead of ‘named arguments’ (equivalently ‘keyword arguments’).
I don’t usually like the style that you reasonably understood the PEP to be encouraging (x = 1; f(x=)) unless there’s a good justification that it improves readability in context and did not mean to suggest that we should nudge towards this.