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.
I switched to Manjaro after becoming a father. It's based on Arch Linux. The installation is as fast and guided as an Ubuntu installation. But you get Pacman and AUR. Manjaro is still a rolling release, but they have a bit of delay. They let test ArchLinux users first. So over all it's the most stable, easy to use and uptodate Distribution I ever had.
As the name indicates I try to run it as a public journal. I write down stuff I learned without setting me any targets. The target audience is myself. In the last years I solved a lot of problems and just forgot the details. Local Journaling tooling had a bad search. So I started the public journal to leverage the Google search.