So why the mutation? Are you that worried someone is going to import importlib._bootstrap directly?

This also costs in development complexity because not only do you have to run 'make' to get changes to be testable, but it also leads to difficult debugging situations where if you are not totally sure you got something working you won't find out until you see e.g. that the standard I/O streams were not initialized.

If you really feel the need to hide _frozen_importlib then it would be better to do the minimum required to get import up and running (should be once the encodings are up in Py_Initialize) and then pull in importlib._bootstrap and have that clear out what _frozen_importlib set like __import__(), sys.path_importer_cache(), and eventually sys.meta_path and sys.path_hooks (I wouldn't touch sys.modules, though, thanks to built-ins and extensions not liking to be reloaded).