To get specific, the wording in PEP 20 is: "there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it". Note that the dominant idea here is that there should exist some obvious way. It's merely preferable that there be only one way. Again: this is sensible, but it's not good fodder for newcomers craving purity, or for detractors craving straw men.
PEP 20 itself is often elevated to religious levels of importance, as if it were a design document that served as a blueprint for the design of Python. It's absolutely not that; it was written by Tim Peters (not Guido!) fully eight years after Python's first release. Here's the original email that Tim sent to comp.lang.python on 4 June, 1999: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.python/B_VxeTBClM0.... Note how he finishes: "If the answer to any Python design issue isn't obvious after reading those -- well, I just give up <wink>." Tim is very particular about his winks, and that's not even a <0.5 wink> or a <0.9 wink>, but a full, unqualified <wink>.
To put all of those pieces together: (1) we have a short, tongue-in-cheek document written after-the-fact. (2) It's misinterpreted as a design document for an entire language and ecosystem. (3) A secondary portion of one of its points is misinterpreted to be the entirety of the point. (4) This is done by exuberant newcomers and skeptical detractors who don't accurately represent the Python culture as a whole. This is why you get the impression that the community is adamant about "one way to do it". It's a reasonable extrapolation from the visible evidence, but it's not true.
1. perl has always prided itself that "there's more than one way to do it" including repeated, prominent use of an acronym for that. see timtowtdi.
2. there is a theoretical idea kicking around out there that, if a language allowed for only one way to express any idea, then that language would be a better language (all else being equal) because if you and I always write the same code for the same task, we could easily maintain each other's work. see for example "egoless programming" or the ideas that led to Simonyi's "metaprogramming" (whether or not you agree)
3. perl is a mess
therefore, it might, given the history, make sense to say that about python as a way of trying to point out a salient difference from perl