Annotations without class import? The idea of annotations in Drupal 8 is that annotations names map to classes.
E.g. @ViewsRow -> \Drupal\Views\Annotation\ViewsRow.

From other code I have seen (Symfony, Doctrine), I assumed that to make this work, the annotation class needs to be imported, e.g.

use Drupal\Views\Annotation\ViewsRow;


However, this seems not to be the case for many of the plugin annotations e.g. in Views.

Why? Is this a Drupalism, or would we find the same in some places in Doctrine or Symfony? Is it good practice to omit the import?

In the past I disliked the need for such use statements, because they would show up in the IDE as "unused import". However, now I am using the annotation plugin in PhpStorm, so now it recognizes those imports.
Drupal's annotation system is based on the Doctrine PHP library, and not on Symfony like the rest of Drupal. 

Doctrine uses a global annotation registry to map classes to files (rather than an autoloader). This page contains the list of classes in that registry.

This issue from 2013 shows the Drupal maintainers' decision to remove the need to import annotation classes.

You wouldn't know this by looking at the official Drupal documentation -- they say the annotation classes are loaded "magically".