> "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)

This is a great example of a question that should not be closed as a duplicate. Lists are not tuples in Python, regardless of how similar potential answers may be.

I'm talking here about cases (which is basically all of them) where the first person to ask was simply needlessly specific. Or where the canonical has the list as an incidental detail and the next person insists that the answers won't work because this code has a tuple, you see, and doesn't see the merit in trying them.

If you imagine that the answer should be re-written from scratch to explain that the approach will be the same, you have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of the site. Abstraction of contextually unimportant details is supposed to be an essential skill for programmers.