Agreed.  The best way to reduce accidental incorrect use of the builtin is to make the builtin capable of doing what a people want directly without having to go discover something in a module somewhere.

OTOH so long as zip's docstring that shows up to people from interactive help, pydoc, and hover/alt/meta text in fancier IDEs mentions the caveat and the way to get the strict behavior, either of these two should be sufficient.  I'm pushing forward with a pure documentation update in https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/20118 suitable for 3.8 - it doesn't mention the way to get the other behavior as that isn't settled or short yet, just makes it more obvious what the actual behavior is.

-gps