A new variable is also semantically different from an imported and possibly renamed variable, though not practically if const.
A possible reason for why the import system is so complicated is that renaming wasn’t present for all of v1 (looking it up it seems to be 1.7, was it really that late?). With renames to a couple characters, even qualifying imported modules at accesses and function calls is pretty smooth in practice. I’d still rather import the names to occupy the name in the module and stop assignments of a new one, and might as well use it without qualification sometimes at that point.