Unused imports is perhaps the one area where I would be comfortable removing unused imports. I would never personally allow a third party package into our environment for something like this. I really don’t want to be rude about it, but it’s too “trivial” to rely on an external import for. Not because your code couldn’t be better than ours, it probably will be, but because it’s an unnecessary risk.
For smaller or personal projects I think many people will rely on something like prettier to do the same.
You’re right that this tool may not be useful for some codebases. If your modules are more like “scripts” that include side effects, deleting modules just because it’s not referenced may break things. That should not be the case for react projects that are based on components.
In our development process, we don’t allow the changes made by this tool to be deployed automatically. Instead we make sure the changes are okay by creating a pull request and reviewing. We treat it more like an assistant that does all the cumbersome clean up work in no time.