I've never had a complaint about logging stuff in python. It generally does what I expect.

"Create a copy of your object and print that" is what I ended up doing, but I don't think most people would say that's intuitive. I expect if i print something at a particular time, I get what it is at that point in time.

I'd just like to highlight what you mention below: Logging it as an object allows you to inspect it in the browser console, presumably with some JSON tree representation, rather than just a dumb string.

It's described in the "Outputting a single object" example here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/console#examples