As argued elsewhere, I think it would be much simpler from a distribution POV to distribute style files as plain python packages (see e.g. #14943.). Even if you do want to keep the mplstyle syntax, just distribute them in a subpackage of your normal python package and make the usage import mystyle; mpl.style.use(mystyle.get_rc()) or something similar.

I could also hide this like

import foobar
foobar.set_mpl_style()  # executes mpl.style.use(foobar.get_rc())

but this is less explicit and more verbose than

mpl.style.use("foobar")

I'd like to make it easy for my users.

It's just one import, and then mpl.style.use(foobar.style), which is really not that bad. And as argued elsewhere, if your user has access to foobar.style (a dict), they have much more freedom to poke into it (it's a plain dict, they know how to handle that), whereas if they have access to "foobar" (a string), they can't do anything with it (other than passing it to mpl.style.use).

I think you're right. I hadn't thought about the possibility of passing a dict to the style.use(). Thanks!