Exactly. It’s not that getting rid of duplicates is bad, is that they may be a symptom of something worse. E.g. incorrect aggregation logic

When I'm in pandas (or was, I don't use it anymore) I'm always downstream of some weird data process that ultimately exported to a CSV from a team that I know has very lax standards for data wrangling, or it is just not their core competency. I agree that duplicates are a smell but they happen often in the use-cases that I'm specifically reaching to pandas for.