Hi @schollii,
I believe this term “coalesce” came from SQL, where most dialects have a function of the same name which has essentially the same effect. I imagine whether that name is intuitive or not will unfortunately depend on whether you are familiar with that function.
I don’t have any other ideas to suggest other than the explicit condition or the coalesce function. I don’t think we would consider adding yet another way to achieve the same effect, since the conditional expression is already very expressive for situations like this.