So the idea now is to inappropriately force everything to be a class?
It is appropriate. That's how it was designed. Obviously superglobals were not designed to be user-definable.
If configuration is defined in a class, then as a maintainer, you can easily determine where the data was defined (unless you do things are even less appropriate), but simply looking up the class.
Globals (and superglobals) can be defined _anywhere_. This makes them a maintenance nightmare, and a very inappropriate place to store data such as configuration information.
S