Libraries for this have always existed, triggering import on first access. The problem was, they would break linters. But that's not an issue anymore with typing.TYPE_CHECKING.

A PEP is very much welcome, but using lazy import libraries is a fairly common, very old, method of speeding things up. My pre PEP 690 code looks like this:

    import typing
    from lazy import LazyImport

    member = LazyImport('my_module.subpackage', 'member')
    member1, member2, = LazyImport('my_module', 'member1', 'member2')
    
    if typing.TYPE_CHECKING:
        # normal import, for linter/IDE/navigation. 
        from my_module.subpackage import member
        from my_module import member1, member2

Well if you use argparse or one of the many argparse wrappers for a moderately complex CLI you end up lazyfing the CLI parser itself because just fully populating the argparse data structures can easily take half a second or more, so with other startup costs you easily end up with "program --help" taking >1s and any CLI parsing error also taking >1s.