There are 4 required positional arguments, and you passed 3. Thus the last one (s) is missing; this is an error message generated by Python, and I don't think we should try to guess which argument was forgotten.

In general, pyplot cannot be used to manipulate 3D plots. As you have correctly observed, the function signatures apply to 2D only.

Concerning the "missing" argument: since you created a Axes3D, the signature for text() is

text(self, x, y, z, s, zdir=None, **kwargs)

The message TypeError: text() missing 1 required positional argument: 's' is correct because you have provided 3 parameters, which will be bound to x, y, z. So the value for s is indeed missing. This parameter binding is core python functionality and it's not possible to intercept it or manipulate the error message.

IMHO the only thing that could be done, is a note here that pyplot cannot be used for 3D plots. Something along the lnes of:

Note:
pyplot cannot be used for 3D plots, because it's function sigantures are strictly 2D and cannot provide the additional information needed for 3D. Instead, use the explicit API by calling the respective methods on the Axes3D object.

Ah OK - I see. That does make sense.

I hadn't noticed text3D(self, x, y, z, s, zdir=None, **kwargs).

We could (not clear whether we should) make the decorator for pyplot functions create a wrapper function that first checks whether gca() is a 3D axes and warns/raises accordingly, even before actually forwarding the parameters.

Given that mplot3d is an addon package and not core Matplotlib, I feel we should not add additional code to pyplot to just get slightly better error messages. - I acknowlegde however that this is rather an academic argument and that distinction doesn't mean anything to most of our users.

From a practical point of view, AFAIK we have not seen other issues on this, so it does not seem a very pressing problem. If there come additional complaints later, we can always add the check then.