Take a look at https://bugs.python.org/issue25711 which wants to rewrite zipimport from scratch.  I took Serhiy's C->Python patch and turned it into a PR, but it would need a lot of love to get it into shape.

(Let's not even talk about https://bugs.python.org/issue32866 which caused me some pain during importlib.resources work.)

Pretty sure Thomas's rumored rewrite is still in C, and it solves problems like support for zip64 and comments, which we've run into also.

zipimport is crucial for single-file executable solutions like pex and our own soon-to-be-open-sourced tool, so it really can't go away.  Both of those still unpack wheels/eggs/sdists to a file system cache, not so much for speed but because shared libraries generally can't be imported from anything but a physical path (thanks to dlopen()).  I think Google has a patch for glibc that would solve that but there's some hesitation from the glibc maintainers to merge it (and then what about other platforms?).