Never often won't be handled by type checkers in a way that you might naively expect. Could you try some examples and see how type checkers handle them?

Also, every overload makes type checking a bit more complicated for type checkers. What sort of use cases does this help?

Yeah I thought I might add some tests just in case. I first validated with Pylance locally, but you never know.

Also, every overload makes type checking a bit more complicated for type checkers. What sort of use cases does this help?

Just for completeness sake honestly. It was a curiosity I had in astral-sh/ruff#16569 (comment) to try iter("") and noticed that it resulted in Iterator[str] when we can statically know there's nothing to iterate over.

At that point I figured may as well submit the change I tried for fun.

Diff from mypy_primer, showing the effect of this PR on open source code:

ibis (https://github.com/ibis-project/ibis)
+ ibis/expr/types/generic.py:1705: error: "Never" has no attribute "to_expr"  [attr-defined]

altair (https://github.com/vega/altair)
+ tools/vega_expr.py:811: error: "Never" has no attribute "get"  [attr-defined]

Turns out it's Any that holds surprises here 😉😅

Seems Any/Unknown will just match the first overload, so it matches Literal[""]

If passing Any to an overload resulted in a union of of all possible return types *cough* using AnyOf *cough* this would be fine. But as-is matching the first param just leads to false-positives in untyped code and no known real-world benefit. So I'll close this for now.