IMO, the "one obvious way to do things" has always been a comforting fiction. There are numerous ways to do everything, the worst offenders forcing people to make tradeoffs between debuggability and readability (ie, for loops versus list comprehensions). Many of them are purely about readability (ternary expression versus if blocks) and many of them are about style (ternary expression versus use of or/and short-circuiting). Even so, before the walrus operator, there was never a way to define a variable that only existed in the scope of a particular if statement.

After using pattern matching in Rust and switch statements in JavaScript, I personally am very excited for that addition to Python, but I understand the feature is divisive and will concede it as a matter of opinion.

Edit: turns out the walrus operator does not cause the variable to move out of scope after the if block, which is disappointing. IMO the worse anti-pattern has already been part of the language, which is not creating new scopes for if statements.

Half of python was always syntactic sugar that could be also done one way or another with more primitive code. I mean for-loops, elif, import, the whole OOP; all just redundant syntactic sugar. Pythonic never meant to make the syntax less "sweet". Python is about making simple, straight forward code which removes unnecessary friction. And that's exactly what the walrus and switch are doing on their own.

But yes, of course can one also argue that they add friction on the global scale, because it's yet another syntax-element to know about, and the benefit is rather small on surface. But that's the problem with syntax, it's always a trade-off between overhead and benefit.

The "one thing to do it" was never to be taken literally, it was mostly to mock Perl programmers.

Python always had at least half a dozen ways of doing trivial things such as packaging dependencies or even doing http requests or looping over stuff.