Well, strict, warnings, and lib are all pragmas, so I don't expect them to behave the same as user-written modules. CGI mostly uses the import parameters for importing. The "pragmas" it provides could be handled in another way. The CGI interface is pretty strange, and I wouldn't hold it up as an example of something I would want others to follow.

I've certainly never read that rule anywhere and don't assume only symbol exporting when I see a module.

There are no rules, as we all know, but some things are more confusing than others. Sometimes people go overboard with Perl's flexibility in order to get a certain syntax that appeals to them. The core documentation on the creation of modules is nearly all about using Exporter, and the idea that a function called "import" would be doing something entirely unlike importing is not obvious to people who haven't seen it done before.