[BurningFrog]

I don't doubt it's a tricky and complicated change to do.

But if it was viewed as a major language bug, I think they'd find a way.

[aeturnum]

IMO the way to think about it is that the turing-complete nature of python imports is one of the central design decisions of the language. Lots of python oddities make more sense once you realize that the module structure is determined at runtime - including the enormous capacity for the language to do its own setup (or fail to do its own setup in amazingly complex ways).

So it's not a bug, it's one of the central choices that makes python "pythonic."