I'm not the OP but I'm guessing with OP moving to Clojure that the bloat is basically any special syntax or special language feature that basically boils down to a function call or a let statement. A lot of functional programming languages have minimalistic expression syntax and they are just as expressive as OP needs them to be.

It's a pattern moreso than this specific feature. There's an important qualitative distinction for me between something that's on the level of a library (even if it's the stdlib) on the one hand and first class features (ie things that require parser level support) on the other.

Python has historically been very conservative about this but in recent years has had one controversial language extension after another, while parts of the language that actually need love are left to languish IMO.

I wanna be very clear that this is me changing my mind -- I was (still am) very on board with the highly controversial assignment expressions ("walrus operator") for instance.

I don't have much faith about what the Python language will look like if you project the current rate of changes forward 10, 15, 20 years. It really doesn't help that I consider this new thing an active antifeature.

I feel like this is begging the question... This t-string feature is only controversial inasmuch as comments like yours here are criticizing it as being controversial...