Yes, that’s what i wanted to say.
It does indeed have a performance-impact because @imported files are downloaded sequentially. So the browser has to first download der AO-css-file and will then learn that he needs those imported files. If you use the link method instead the downloads can be parallelized. It’s one factor in the google page speed and the recommendation is to avoid @import.
(For reference)
For me it would be enough to just have an option to leave those @imports out but it sure would be a nice feature if you instead changed it to linking.
Best Regards,
Andreas