> There are more recent popular languages where the situation is much
> better. The author of s.el came from one of them.

I can only talk about the stuff I'm familiar with.  Let others bring
up counter-arguments from other places.  But while doing that, let's
remember to compare the sizes of the languages, because a small enough
language can definitely use an exhaustive list of candidates to the
benefit of the users.

I don't understand why we still need to come up with examples of other languages (in other languages they usually have namespaces as the norm), but here's a list of examples:

https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.2.0/File.html
https://clojure.github.io/clojure/clojure.string-api.html
https://docs.python.org/3/library/filesys.html
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/thread/index.html
https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/vectors.html

I understand that just because this technique is popular doens't mean it's good or right or that it applies to elisp.

Philippe