Its not broken? Just like with everything, you have to understand semantics.

If you are writing anything more than a single file, a.k.a a module that has directories and subdirectories, which you will import in another place, you are supposed to put everything into a package format and install it with pip install -e ./

Then, within the module are free to use the absolute imports starting with the module name, or relative ones, and it all works like a charm. The import system is designed around this.

Alternatively, you can modify the PYTHONPATH env variable, or modify sys.path dynamically, to append to paths and import directly.