You wrote:
"I found somewhere that the items in the Imports folder count toward my overall space used (seems weird). "
It's weird and wrong.
Imports isn't a "folder" or an Album-- it's a particular view of your Library. The Imports view shows all the pictures imported into your Library in the order they were imported. If you remove a picture from Imports, then it can't be in the Library. Other such views are "Recently Saved," "Videos," "Favorites," and others. If you trash a picture in these different views of your Library, then they are removed from the Library. A picture can be seen in several places without taking up any extra space. In Photos, there is never one "correct folder." I'm guessing that by "folder" you are meaning Album.
The thing is, in Photos, pictures aren't exactly "in" an album. When you "put a picture into an album," its name is added to a list of pictures from the Library that display together when the album is clicked, kind of like a music playlist, but for pictures. So two albums can both have the same picture name in their lists (like two playlists with the same song,) and that picture will show up when you click either album, but there's only one picture file-- it's just on multiple lists. And when you remove a picture from an album, its name remains in the lists of other albums, and the file still remains in your Library.
So albums give a specific view of your pictures. The picture of "Aunt Ethel at the Grand Canyon" can be in the "Aunt Ethel" album with other pictures of Aunt Ethel, and it can also be in the "Grand Canyon" album with pictures of other people at the Grand Canyon. And it can also be in a the "September 2015" album with other things that happened then. Each album is pointing to a single file stored in the Photos Library, so having pictures in multiple albums takes up no more storage space. As you can imagine, this is very powerful in organizing pictures.
For Photos on a Mac, you can make a Smart Album that shows just the pictures you want. Smart Albums aren't available in iOS or iPadOS, but there are filters that give specified views.
