Ha, if only! I've been the one to introduce this at the last three jobs I've had, two of which had hundreds of engineers and plenty of python code before I got there.

"Best practices" are incredibly unevenly distributed, and I suspect this is only more true for data/ML-heavy python code.

New (v5) isort doesn't move imports to the top of the file anymore, at least not by default. There is a flag to retain the old behavior, but even then I don't think it will move imports from, say, inside a function body to the top of the module.