The reason this "GOTCHA" is mentioned here is that there are many cases where reuse of an attribute is achieved through subsetting (such as "standalone" attributes owned by a package).
In the case where a "standalone" attribute has a feature value it should be used directly as imported.
If you wish to have a shorter name for an imported attribute with a value you can of course just assign it to another attribute using = binding, but using an import alias is probably a cleaner approach.