People said the same about Perl and its “there’s more than one way to do things” ethos, which gained much criticism.
Same is true for C++.
In this specific case, I think a lazy load directive isn’t a bad addition. But one does need to be careful about adding new language features just because you have an active community.
Perhaps people won't use it. But I for one want it to be used, and I will certainly be using it in my own code if the PEP is accepted. Startup time is very important to me, more important than the cost of making the code noisier. I just wish I didn't have to make that tradeoff in the first place.
In fact, half of the community basically uses only a modernized set of python 2.4 features and that's one of the beauties of the language. You don't need a lot to be productive, and if you want more, you can optionally reach for it.
It has worked very well for the last 2 decades and it will likely work again.