Ie debated about this with myself (and with a friend!) over the last few days, and I've concluded that evaluating strings by default is too opinionated for the standard library. I've changed both inspect.signature() and inspect.get_annotations() so eval_str is False by default (and removed the ONLY_IF_STRINGIZED logic entirely). Both functions will still raise an exception if eval_str=True, but this will only happen if the user explicitly requests evaluating the strings.
I've already updated the PR.