There is a place for it - like when you're trying to express a set of logic that will be guarded by the same condition, but always at the cost of some complexity.
A set of conditionals is probably the most obvious way to express branching.
That's what I recommend too[0] - with the added caveat that you shouldn't be afraid to "knock it" if it turns out to be honestly bad.
Sometimes the idea turns out bad, sometimes it turns out great - but you'll never know it if you don't try; just be honest with yourself during that trial.
* Python standard library functions, especially the ones on dicts, mutate and don't return the new dictionary.
* Python's syntax for creating functions is awkward: lambdas are cumbersome, and so are the operator package and eg functools.partial; there's no really convenient way to compose functions.This is something that bugs me about the fluent builder pattern in Java -- continuing to return `this` until suddenly you don't any more, and you can't re-use 'intermediate' values because they're actually all the same object.
Besides object polymorphism and sets of conditionals, there's also generalized predicate dispatch, but that's probably an overkill for many things.