did the command simply come in a later version so force was already in use?
Discussion
Probably, but it is not really an excuse.
They could have just added a prefix, for example --safe-force, let people migrate and eventuyally later deprecate --force for something different. Or first deprecate --force and steal it (it is conservative and less dangerous, so should cause no loss of data).
thx 😁 I had also been looking for the commit