This questions is just out of curiosity.
If I looked correctly the extensions maintained in the WMF repo are now changed in a way that this system must be used instead of the classic one. So people now end up using this system of invoking extensions, the classing way of adding the require_once as well the Composer system of automatically invoking extensions.
I imagine that this is pretty confusing for some people who do not deal with configuring MW every day. Indeed, sometimes one has to push people to their own good but transition periods for this are cool too.