Absolutely. But on the other hand, it's still very useful that Python does work like this: it's nice to be able to directly do things at the top level (e.g. set

Absolutely. But on the other hand, it's still very useful that Python does work like this: it's nice to be able to directly do things at the top level (e.g. setting up "constants" with a little computation, conditionally importing modules or importing fallbacks, etc.). As the article says, it's also an extremely clean way of defining what gets run in what order during startup.