I want to say it (or something similar at least) was originally addressed by from __future__ import annotations back in Python 3.7/3.8 or thereabouts? I definitely remember having to use stringified types a while back but I haven't needed to for quite a while now.

Yes, annotations allows you to use the declared types as they are, no strings.

It turns them into thunks (formerly strings) automatically, an important detail if you're inspecting annotations at run time because the performance hit of resolving the actual type can be significant.

TIL, thanks! It looks like 3.14 is also changing it so that all evaluations are lazy.

At last, Pi-thon.