which makes sense to me. params is passing the reference to the dict into the function. Whereas, **params is expanding the dict into the scope of the function before calling the first line of the body.

You can update the content of the former in-place, while the latter is just syntactic sugar for variadic function arguments.

Not OP but the advice to limit the scope kind of kills the fun for me. I don’t want to code up the 100th variant of pong or pokemon-look-alike.