The idea of async imports did come up during the PEP 690 discussion. I could’ve sworn there was more but maybe it was in another thread or in I’m just remembering our SC conversations during discussions of the PEP.
Regardless my understanding from talking with @thomas is that Meta may be working on what will probably become a new proposal for deferring import time work to improve startup time. Lots of Python users do want soem form of the feature to improve startup time, both for CLIs, notebooks, production applications, and to improve time spent in CI running tests (which are often targeted and execute far fewer codepaths than an application would).
PEP 649 has finally landed and gives us deferred evaluation for annotations. perhaps reusing that mechanism for import namespace related dicts could be involved?