An adjacent thread has some confusion about whether chained assignments happen left to right or right to left. Honestly that’s a factoid I don’t expect most Python programmers to know. It’s usually a bad idea to rely on people knowing arcade details of a language, especially a language like Python that has attracted many non-programmers like data scientists. (I have nothing against data scientists but their brainpower shouldn’t be wasted on remembering these kind of details.)

I've been programming Python since 1.5.2 days and indeed, I didn't know the order of evaluation of chained assignments.

That said, it's the self-referencing list in your example that's the more confusing part. It's atypical to have self-referencing data structures, so that's something I'd comment in the design if I needed one.