It's not like you're forced to not use them.
Once again proof that you've never worked with others, not even indirectly. When someone writes code that breaks encapsulation you end up having to write more code to work around the breakage. It gets messy, fast.
For an example of what I'm talking about try subclassing the Image class in the Python Imaging Library, then weep when you realise that the Image class uses a function (in the Image module of course) to build Image objects instead of a constructor (the constructor itself just initializes all members to 0, which is pretty pointless in Python), so you can't simply call super().