> that isn't going to work if you try to use type hints in python because you're going to end up with a cyclic import. More specifically, you don't need cyclic imports in Python normally because you don't need the types, but you HAVE to import the types to add type hints, which introduces cyclic imports JUST to add type hints.
Yes, `typing.TYPE_CHECKING` is there so that you can conditionally avoid imports that are only needed for type annotations. And yes, importing modules can have side effects and performance implications. And yes, I agree it's ugly as sin.
But Python does in fact allow for cyclic imports — as long as you're importing the modules themselves, rather than importing names `from` those modules. (By the way, the syntax is the other way around: `from ... import ...`.)