It is a real issue in the sense that phones reported lost or stolen to carriers results in an IMEI ban. It doesn't matter what the technical advantages to the end user are, what matters is if a carrier suddenly decides to shut off a thousand phones because they made an assumption about the nature of IMEIs that is expected to always be true.
In today's world of activation locked iPhones being far more effective in preventing theft than IMEI banning, it's time to get rid of privacy breaking things like IMEIs.
Changing imei is a very easy task here. People can unlock apple iphone with 50$ etc so I think having same IMEI is good at least for privacy.