When you do a relative import, __package__ is used to help resolve it, but if it isn't defined we fall back on using __name__ and __path__. We should probably consider raising an ImportWarning if __package__ isn't defined so that some day we can consider cleaning up __import__ and its call signature to be a bit more sane and drop the `globals` argument. It would also help people catch errors where they went overboard deleting attributes off a module.
We should probably even extend it to start using __spec__.parent and then falling back to __package__, and only after both are found missing do we raise the ImportWarning about needing to use __name__ and __path__. That way __import__ can simply start taking in the spec of the calling module to do all of its work instead of having to pass all of globals().