Parsing JSON safely

Do not trust the shape

response.json() gives you whatever the server sent. Reaching straight into it with square brackets assumes every key is present and every field is the type you expect, which is how a client breaks at three in the morning when an API adds a null.

Defensive reading is short and worth it:

data = response.json()
name = data.get("name", "unknown")
tags = data.get("tags") or []          # handles both missing and null
count = int(data.get("count", 0))

Note or [] rather than a plain default: data.get("tags", []) still returns None if the key exists with a null value, which is the case that actually bites.

Your turn: write read_user(payload) that copes with missing and null fields, returning {"name": ..., "team": ..., "tags": [...]} with defaults "unknown", "none" and [].