It's true about the copy/paste approach as well.
But I just made a test with a fairly complex V4 character in detailed outfit. Standard import made the resources drop significantly, duplicating the object 10 times resulted in slight resource drop for each instance. The same for copy/paste.
I then imported the same figure into an ecosystem (new scene). Resource drop was less than half of that of the standard import. I populated the ecosystem plane with about 4.000 instances, no reportable resource drop.
Interesting, I think :)