IIRC, the new unpacking code still works like the old in that it special-cases list and tuple (where it can use the fast indexing API that just accesses the C array underneath), but for everything else it calls a function with iter(obj). If so, adding the length for list and tuple would be trivial, but adding it for other builtin types would not.

Is list and tuple good enough? It won’t help your example use, where it’s str, but I think for that case you don’t generally care that the string had 6 chars instead of 2; you already know the problem from it being a string in the first place. I suspect that almost every time the type is right but the length isn’t, the type is list, tuple, or a non-builtin type. How often do you accidentally unpack a length-6 dict where you wanted to unpack a length-2 dict?