Sadly many things define the __or__ operator, including dicts and sets which are common to find in pipelines. (https://peps.python.org/pep-0584/ was a happy day for everyone but me!)

In practice, rshift gives a lot more flexibility! And you’d rarely chain after a numeric value.

It’s still useful in related situations. The following crime often finds its way into my $PYTHONSTARTUP:

  class more:
      def __ror__(self, other):
          import pydoc
          pydoc.pager(str(other))
  more = more()

and here the low precedence of | is useful.

Or overloading division like https://scapy.net/