both lazy imports and free threading have been proposed ages ago, they both went through several iterations before a good design was settled upon and made it into the language.

in the case of lazy imports the big corps were the ones doing the experimentation and iteration. the feature didn't make it into the language "just when big corps wanted them"; the instagram stack you allude to already had its own fork of cpython with lazy imports added years ago, and that is not the design that ended up getting adopted by upstream cpython, though some of the people working on it also collaborated on the PEP that finally did make it in.

It was accepted just as multiple large corporations with competent teams of internal tool departments ended up forking the interpreter to support lazy imports and demonstrated empirically that the idea has merit.

I too am outraged that a product would prioritize its biggest users.