PEP 622 proposes a special use for _: to match anything, discarding the whatever value matches.  (If I understand.)  This aligns with the way _ is conventionally used in other statements.  This special use in case statements feels weird given that _ is otherwise just an ordinary variable.  It may even have a value going into the case/match statement, which would be ignored.

Has there been any discussion on deprecating use of _ as an R-value?  In other words, making _ a "black hole" variable "preposition" into which values go but never come out?  Besides the benefit of unifying the conventional use of _ with its proposed use  in case/match statements, another benefit for CPython would be that _ would no longer hang onto references and would therefore not prevent garbage collection of whatever was put into it.

Best,

Neil