Maybe. But that's largely irrelevant since we are discussing the impact of a syntax choice regarding an operator on an explicitly-mutable container type, and specifically the behavior of it used when the container also contains a member of the same type.
And the alleged surprising thing is not the mutability of anything, but thar after the operation, all the members of the other container are the same instance of the inner mutable container type.
Python being designed ground up with immutability by default and explicitly opt-in mutability would not directly have any bearing on this issue, as long as it still had the capacity to express immutable lists and the capacity to apply something like the list-reptition operation to them. Except it would probably make all of the involved examples more verbose.
The critique here is that it's a badly designed language in that it's design decisions often get in the way of writing software that works as you expect. We're not discussing about whether you can learn such a system. The discussion is a lament on why it had to be this way.