> What happened to "one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it"?

There arguably still is—just use f-strings for everything, unless you need to support ancient Python, in which case use %-formatting.

t-strings are a special case, but in theory most functions should only accept regular strings or templates, so there should only be one choice there too.

> Also, the way string formatting interacts with logging is a total mess [...] it doesn't allow you to use late evaluation based on log level.

This all seems to be a side-effect of the fact that string formatting produces static strings, so I don't think that there's much that can be done here (but maybe t-strings can be creatively used here somehow).