Ive only used reduce at work half a dozen times and it does raise an eyebrow each time.
But for unioning a bunch of spark dataframes together i think
df = reduce(DataFrame.union, list_of_dfs)
is much nicer than df, *rest = list_of_dfs
for other in rest:
df = df.union(other)
People just get a bit funny, especially now you have to import it from functools