Perhaps the problem isn't really the increment operator, but rather folks writing too fancy of code while using it. One should probably not deeply nest things like increments... because they do get difficult to read. That's not an increment operator problem though, that's an engineer problem.

The example with Python doesn't apply here. We cannot just go around removing language features because sometimes people write bad code.

Further, if you read the code and walk through it in your head, finding a mistaken tuple someplace unexpected should have been easy to find... which means your senior principal engineer isn't very good at reading code, even if they are very good at writing code.

Reading code is it's own skillset I've found... that and apparently the debug steppers for python aren't very good either...