Bug report

Bug summary

Ticks direction set with Axes.tick_params used to be persistent but is now erased by Axes.cla().
Maybe this change is actually intended ? in any case I couldn't find a mention of it in your release notes so I'm considering it a bug for now.

Code for reproduction

I originally detected a regression in yt, see yt-project/yt#3256
I was able to reproduce the change of behaviour with the following minimal script

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from matplotlib import __version__ as mplver

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.tick_params(direction="in")
ax.cla()
fig.savefig(f"/tmp/mpl_{mplver}_regr.jpg")

Actual outcome

This is with matplotlib 3.4.2

Expected outcome

This is with matplotlib 3.4.1

Matplotlib version

• Operating system: OSX
• Matplotlib version (import matplotlib; print(matplotlib.__version__)): see above
• Matplotlib backend (print(matplotlib.get_backend())): MaxOSX
• Python version: 3.9

installed from pypi with pip