I don't see the appeal in omitting that ceremony. Modern IDEs do it for you. On the other hand, a reader of the code must not replicate the work the autoloader

I don't see the appeal in omitting that ceremony. Modern IDEs do it for you. On the other hand, a reader of the code must not replicate the work the autoloader does. If there is a class named Database from the backend module. The concrete class referenced there is highly dependent on the environment, the autoloader has at runtime. For me, this seems to be a source of many non reproducable bugs.