Not to mention the notorious circular import problem, that is much more likely in a big codebase.

If I have a custom class, that class has to be passed as a type hint for functions. What If I use that class in another module, but have to import it inside this one that has a type-hint only?

Well, let me introduce you to their genious solution:

  from _future_ import annotations
  from foomod import FooClass

  def myfun(foo: FooClass):
    return foo.bar()

Not once did I find the additional typing useful in my actual day-to-day work.

In my opinion there is no excuse not to.

Adding stronger typing, like type hints, could reverse that, of course.

The reason not to is performance and reliability. Typing helps with the latter, Python is just bad at the former.

Luckily IDEs can auto add the imports, but sometimes a slightly mistyped piece of code auto adds an import I need to delete, I love avoiding imports and circular imports in PHP. The other nice thing is avoiding random python behaviour differences in MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu. Code that works fine in CircleCI but not locally. Works on a Mac but not on windows etc… I didn’t experience that with PHP.

Not sure there are a huge number of long term PHP devs who switch to Python or the other way around to have a reasonable opinion.