I didn’t go for export syntax because that would have made the proposal much more disruptive, but I’m not completely opposed to the idea. One of the downsides of new syntax is that libraries have to wait a while to adopt it because they need to support older Python versions, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a proposal for export also included __export__ solely for backwards compatibility (kind of like how lazy import has __lazy_modules__).
But again, this discussion is a better fit for the PEP thread; if you strongly believe new syntax is the best way to go, please voice your opinion there!