Yes thanks for finding the Python 2.4 release page which shows the optimization! So I remembered correctly -- Python already had that optimization back then. (There seems to be a large amount of confusion on that in this subthread)

And the March 2005 Artima post is also a very good reference! That actually predates my story, since Guido hadn't joined Google by then. I recall that he joined in December 2005.

So maybe the bug I remember was more of a "push" in the direction he had already thought of, not the direct inspiration.

It's clear from the blog post that he disliked all of map / filter / reduce, and then I'm sure that users or python-dev pushed back on removing them, so he settled for banishing reduce() to the stdlib.