That’s definitely part of it.

The other half is hyrum’s law.

There’s a lot of situations in reasonable unordered map implementations where the elements, by chance, do happen to be ordered. Just due to arbitrary implementation decisions.

But the Go spec says that maps are unordered, and library writers want to reserve the right to change the implementation in the future.

So always ransoming the dict prevents code from accidentally depending on some specific map implementation detail.