If you're not convinced try to...
You are correct. It is indeed very difficult to get the client to even use TCP/IP on a local machine any more, which I could only do by setting the host to 127.0.0.1. The word "localhost" now seems to exclusively mean unix socket for mysql.
Thank-you, that not only turns this into a non-bug, but it means I can relax a bit on my configurations for mysql/mariadb in the future and not worry about ensuring they are explicitly set to unix sockets across the board.
