If you have seen other people suggest that using a _ for an unused import that is unused because you commented out the variables using it, they are just doing more work for a worse result.

If you comment out code that uses an import, comment out the import too. It's not just the recommended way, it's the only logical way of doing things.

And how is having 2 opinions on how to do something a sign that this is not the proper solution? People still can't agree on tabs vs spaces (and probably never will be able to), that doesn't mean that all programming isn't a proper solution. There are also people that think using version control is a bad idea, but that doesn't mean that all version control is broken...