I think I should have used Cunningham's law instead of asking questions in [this post](https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-810-explicit-lazy-imports/104131/176). I suspect I would have gotten more people weighing in.
*Ahem* I hereby affirmatively state that the ONLY ergonomic way to functionally backport lazy imports would be to use a context manager. Even a *genius* could not come up with a better way.
Though I will admit that there are also NO OTHER REASONS for putting lazy imports in a context manager. It's just the backwards compatibility use case and no others.