A more fundamental issue behind this: unittest's plain text verbose output is not intended to be parsable and consumable by machines. It is 22 years old and was intended for use in 80 column wide terminals as a progress report while watching it run as much it is a final result.  Consider that the legacy use case or format if you wish.

Allowing an option for output to one line per test with description could be more likely to require horizontal scrolling or reading past a line wrap in CI setups where text is scrolling regions embedded in scrolling regions.  Yuck.  BUT not necessarily bad.  Just different.

The ideas expressed in this thread of making a more clear text format with the important PASS/FAIL/ERROR/SKIP status up front and a very clear pastable test module.class.test_name seem wise.

I expect most Python projects with nicer test output formatting desires have simply adopted pytest and never looked back.

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Other python unittest derivative concepts to get clear output of results:

We add a reliably machine parsable XML report of test outcomes in absl-py https://github.com/abseil/abseil-py/tree/main/absl/testing. It's IMNSHO a rather annoying implementation - we wish unittest made plugging in additional output formats easier. We use that generated XML format for results from unittest systems in all of our languages at work, it is picked up and parsed by our internal CI system and used to display nicely formatted results when available.

I assume pytest also provides machine parsable reporting capabilities but I haven't looked.