The problem can be even more immediate. Person 2 (a junior or intern) is given the normally mundane task to go through the code base and replace pandas with foo

The problem can be even more immediate. Person 2 (a junior or intern) is given the normally mundane task to go through the code base and replace pandas with foozle, a faster, but less mature alternative. They try to replace the pd.read_csv() calls with foozle's equivalent, say fz.read_csv(). So, pd.read_csv("csvbase://") becomes fz.read_csv("csvbase://"). Only, Foozle hasn't implemented fsspec and person 2 doesn't know anything about it either. Fun times.