"The real question for me is: why are you interested in speeding up the
import of the operator module? 200 µs won't make a visible difference."

Alone, the gain is useless, but it's like the work done in Python 3.4 to avoid loading some modules at startup. The overall idea is to have a fast startup time.

I heard that Python 3 startup time is a major blocker point for Mercurial for example.

But maybe this specific issue is not worth the trouble. (Other parts should be optimized.)