In our codebase, we have pretty strict developer-enforced rules about not doing I/O at the module level, usually through the use of simple "Lazy" wrappers for module-level objects. I'd be curious to know what other approaches people have taken with Python here.
I always treated this a bit like single underscore private functions/methods, i.e., follow a convention that produces code that's easy to reason about, even if it's not strictly enforced by the language/compiler. So in practice this equates to separating out modules that mutate global state, and placing the majority of logic in "strict" modules that only declare a bunch of "pure" classes/routines. So the "non strict" code is really just a thin layer of wiring gluing everything together. For instance my Celery task files tend to be very thin.
my_db_conn: Lazy[DbConn] = Lazy(lambda: make_db_conn(...))
and MyPy will tell you if you're doing something silly when you try to use it.
EDIT: After typing up this response and submitting I realize you were talking about their strict approach rather than ours. whoops :)