what sense does it make to use this long code?
Purely in terms of execution speed, apart from the non-implementation of the “time/utime” library and much worse readability, especially when several of these functions are also combined with output formatting, I can’t see any real advantage.

If you forego the explicit import function of a library component and leave the basic command import, this notation corresponds to the same waste of RAM as if you were importing these libraries in question via the import statement from __main__. This has an impact on the compiler cache.
It’s more likely that your code with the many LEDs runs relatively well and flawlessly in WOKI. But this code can be shortened to over half of the program code using LIST mapping.
A nice code gimmick with maximum line lengths and without taking the Python format directive into account. Objectively readable code should contain line breaks ‘\’ with a maximum display line length of 78 characters, which corresponds to the line length in the command shell.

Wow, I must admit that I learned a new, interesting thing here today.
I tested it and discovered that you can use the machine library without expliciting it. So, for example:
for machine import ADC
pot_pin = 26
pot = ADC(pot_pin)
works as well as:
pot_pin = 26
pot = machine.ADC(pot_pin)

But this is not working with any module. For example, the time.sleep() requires an explicit import of the time module or its sleep submodule.

Many thanks, Jonnathan!

Thank you Jonnathan. Your project with LEDs controlled by a potentiometer and Raspberry PI Pico is really cool!