If it's syntactic sugar for map and getOrElse what is really gained? If the definition of fold is mapAndGetOrElse why add an additional concept to burden programmers minds with? GetOrElse is independently useful and everyone needs to know map anyway. Using fold just seems like a lost opportunity to teach someone getOrElse with no real benefit.

You make the Understanding This Codebase 101 curriculum some percent longer without making your programmers any better.

If it's terseness, I don't really think one symbol is any verbosity benefit over two. Same order of magnitude, same cost. It's a rounding error in brevity. People way overvalue terseness.

And the cost of people missing chances to learn getOrElse has got to be massive.