> I too thought "why not else:?" at first. But "case _:" covers it in
> the one obvious way after grasping how general wildcard matches are.

"case _:" is easy to miss -- I missed it several times reading through the PEP.

> Introducing "else:" too would be adding a wart (redundancy) just to
> stop shallow-first-impression whining.

Huh.  I would consider "case _:" to be the wart, especially since "case default:" or "case anything:" or "case i_dont_care:" all do basically the same thing (although they bind to the given name, while _ does not bind to anything, but of what practical importance is that?) .