>Yes, they make reading imports across your entire project rather difficult: Suddenly there are multiple ways of referring to the same module. If you ever have to do a project-wide search & replace during a refactoring (because your favorite refactoring tool failed you), this will be hell.

> Moreover, in each file you'll end up with a weird blend of absolute and relative imports, depending on what was shorter or looked nicer to the author at the time. Not nice to look at at all.

it sounds like your project had inconsistent import styles leading to this issue. IMO imports should always be relative and always be one imported symbol per line, they should be sorted and linted [1] that they follow this exact form. you will have no issues with imports, merges, search and replaces, etc. after that.

[1] I use https://pypi.org/project/flake8-import-order/ along with an in-house import rendering tool.