Yes, while weird, that's expected behaviour.

Rather than being due to absolute vs relative imports, the difference arises from the fact that in "import pkg.module", the request is explicitly for a submodule, so the submodule import always happens, whereas if you write "from func import attr", the child module import is only attempted if "func.attr" fails to resolve after "func" is imported.

$ echo "print(__name__)" > pkg/__init__.py
$ echo "print(__name__)" > pkg/submodule.py

$ python3 -c "import pkg; pkg.submodule = 1; import pkg.submodule; print(pkg.submodule)"
pkg
pkg.submodule
<module 'pkg.submodule' from '/home/ncoghlan/devel/misc/_play/pkg/submodule.py'>

$ python3 -c "import pkg; pkg.submodule = 1; from pkg import submodule; print(pkg.submodule)"
pkg
1