No I think your point is valid, and is valid in JavaScript too.

Designing the “right” approach to look like the “wrong” approach (string concatenation) is a bad idea, however cute it is.

It’s annoying that the wrong thing is the more ergonomic one, but at least it jumps out at any dev with any experience, they know what sqli risk looks like. With templated strings, it’s not so obvious anymore.

Oh wait I know why. It's because the PIP had no specialized syntax highlighting to show that it was getting the variables from scope. So I started reasoning about it differently than I do about JS string literals, rather lazily too, and ended up thinking of something like emacs's dynamic scope or something. Amazing what syntax highlighting does to how we think.