Of course the method with length-1 axes will look good if it's the only way to do broadcasting. I've hardly touched it (and never saw the NumPy code mentioned in the quote), but some people in the APL community have so I'm reporting on their thoughts. Although length-1 axes already being in the data sounds worrying: you have an array that doesn't depend on an axis, but there's an axis anyway to show where it would go if it did?

Named axis systems like einops are much better regarded. I've seen some implementations of similar functionality in APL, and various discussions of how it could be built into an array language (I have my own design where that's a core idea, but not using APL syntax).