In general I agree with Raymond's principle and I am not very happy doing these changes. But heavy startup is a sore spot of CPython.

For comparison Python 2.7 and optparse:

$ python -c 'import sys; s = set(sys.modules); import argparse; print(len(s), len(sys.modules), len(set(sys.modules) - s))'
(43, 63, 20)
$ python -S -c 'import sys; s = set(sys.modules); import argparse; print(len(s), len(sys.modules), len(set(sys.modules) - s))'
(15, 57, 42)
$ python -c 'import sys; s = set(sys.modules); import optparse; print(len(s), len(sys.modules), len(set(sys.modules) - s))'
(43, 56, 13)
$ python -S -c 'import sys; s = set(sys.modules); import optparse; print(len(s), len(sys.modules), len(set(sys.modules) - s))'
(15, 50, 35)