You don't lose variables going vanilla now. They exist as part of the spec and have widespread adoption. Pretty much if you stopped caring about IE, you can use them now.

As to imports, I'm still of the mind that if you have enough CSS to warrant their use, you've got two to ten times the CSS you need on a site.

But as I keep saying, MOST people seem to be wasting 200k of HTML, 500k of CSS, and megabytes on JavaScript on doing things that don't warrant more than 24k of HTML, 48k of CSS, and little if any JavaScript.

Which is why to me, the extra steps and extra "functionality" provided by LESS/SASS/SCSS is an utterly pointless waste of time for those who generally shouldn't be writing HTML or CSS in the first place.

YMMV, but for me? No. Just making it worse.