Hi Mike, a human here to talk to you. I think option 3 sounds the best way forward. It’s weird to reproduce a language feature (try/except) as an argument.
We can make Django-upgrade drop fail_silently=False from the functions it will be deprecated from, at least. That won’t help folks who set it to True but I’m imagining it will help for cases where IDES or copy pasta populated the argument unnecessarily.