@luabud, any thoughts on this?

I believe Java was the first language to add support for "Show Type Hierarchy" and they also don't support it on object instances. Assuming we want to be consistent with other languages, this is by design, although maybe we should show "No Type Hierarchy found" in the code file like Java does rather than showing "No results" in the results pane.

Intuitively it seems like it should work on instances too since it does work when you do "Show Type Hierarchy" for instance methods (e.g. when you click on instance.__init__ in the example below) - since it deduces the type and the related method in the method case, it seems like it shoud be able to do so in another too.
Another thought that Java is statically typed so every variable usually have it's type next to it, when in Python it happens less often.

But either way, if it's not supported, would be great to have a more descriptive info message like "Showing type hierarchy is not supported on instances", when you see "No results" or "No type hierarchy found" user is left guessing whether it's intentionally not supported or it's a bug.

class Level1:
    def __init__(self):
        print("Level 1 initialized")

class Level2(Level1):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        print("Level 2 initialized")

class Level3(Level2):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        print("Level 3 initialized")

instance = Level2()
instance.__init__()

it is not about whether we can do or not, we didn't simply make it work on instance since type hierarchy is usually invoked on type not instance. but surely, we could support if people want it.

But either way, if it's not supported, would be great to have a more descriptive info message like "Showing type hierarchy is not supported on instances", when you see "No results" or "No type hierarchy found" user is left guessing whether it's intentionally not supported or it's a bug.

I agree. I think we can either try to do what the Java team is doing (to show no results when the command is invoked on an instance) or edit the message on the view to include "Show Type Hierarchy on instances is not supported".

If you'd like to file a request for that to be supported, I'd suggest creating a discussion post so we can get upvotes to gauge interest from other folks too!

Moving this issue to discussions as an enhancement request for comments and upvotes.