PHP will look for it in the global namespace when it isn't defined in the current one. With regards to avoiding `\` everywhere, the indirection makes the code slightly less obvious where certain classes come from. It's essentially creating a local alias to a globally accessible class name when we could just denote that with the leading `\`.

I'm looking at this as a "In an ideal situation, where all of this correctly uses namespaces and is PSR-4 compliant, what would make certain things much easier to find?". It's related to [the `grep` test](http://jamie-wong.com/2013/07/12/grep-test/)