People ask these questions because they're used to the way other languages work, and want to have an analogy to help them understand how Python works.
Except this isn't useful, because Python doesn't work the way those other languages do. They'll run into cases where their mental model of what "pass-by-value" or "pass-by-reference" means does not match up to Python's actual workings, and then they'll spend endless time arguing about which model Python uses when the answer is really "neither, stop trying to shoehorn one of those models onto a language that doesn't fit".
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People ask these questions because they're used to the way other languages work, and want to have an analogy to help them understand how Python works.
Except this isn't useful, because Python doesn't work the way those other languages do. They'll run into cases where their mental model of what "pass-by-value" or "pass-by-reference" means does not match up to Python's actual workings, and then they'll spend endless time arguing about which model Python uses when the answer is really "neither, stop trying to shoehorn one of those models onto a language that doesn't fit".