You make a good point about "Y/n" being more dangerous than refusing and requiring an explicit option be passed.

The clear warning about what commits will be lost is not at all how I remember force-push working.

That said, I usually use magit in emacs for git and understand the force options well, so I haven't actually looked at the standard push failure warning in years. Maybe I'm remembering wrong, or perhaps it's been improved in recent versions.