See Prevent compatibility regressions The future import makes legacy print statements syntax errors even in Python 2 which prevents Python 2 developers from making changes which break Python 3 compatibility.

https://docs.python.org/3/howto/pyporting.html#prevent-compatibility-regressions

$ python2 -c “from __future__ import print_function ; print 'hi'” —> Syntax error

I think this isn't worth worrying about, we could use from __future__ import print_function all over for our utilities, but in practice we never had people adding back old style print statements.