> You can just pass `--preload` to have gunicorn load the application once. If you're using a standard framework like Django or Flask and not doing anything obviously insane then this works really well and without much effort. Yeah I'm sure some dumb libraries do some dumb things, but that's on them, and you for using those libraries.

It's not always trivial to ensure none of your dependencies have import-time side effects. Sometimes the productivity/business benefit provided by the depedendency outweighs the pain introduced by the side effects.