It seems to me that you're conflating two unrelated things. Yes, I agree -- there are perfectly legitimate reasons to implement module level functions instead of class and instance methods; but avoiding typing four extra characters just to be more like some other arbitrary language is not one of them.

Python has a different "philosophy" than "C++ et al". Literally everything is an object, and everything has attributes; some of those attributes are objects that implement the Callable protocol. And it's a syntactic sugar that some of those callables are implicitly passed certain predefined arguments; the default is passing the instance of the object itself. The exact same thing could have been implemented without it, like this:

    foo.some_callable_attribute(foo, another_argument)

Since methods are usually called more often than they are declared, it makes sense to make this first argument the default.

Conversely, I think the beauty is that they _are_ the same as top-level functions, just in a special namespace. This means that you can call "instance methods" directly from a class, i.e. the following are equivalent:

    (1) + 2
    (1).__add__(2)
    int.__add__(1, 2)

This comports with the "explicit is better than implicit" policy in Python. The only "magic" part is when dot-notation is used to call an instance method, which is just syntactic sugar. Another example of this philosophy is that operator overloading is simply reduced to implementing a method with a specific name.

I think a "magic" this keyword can create a lot of nasty edge cases that can be difficult to reason about; the way "this" is used in JavaScript is notoriously complex in ways that it might not be in a statically typed language like C++. What should "this" evaluate to outside of an instance method? What about in a class definition inside an instance method? What if an instance method is called directly instead of on an instance? All of these situations require making their own "rules", whereas in Python the correct answers can be easily reasoned about by starting from first principles.