... is there a better way to do this too?

Not really, UNIVERSAL::require is nice, but it pollutes UNIVERSAL, which is bad. Inside Moose we actually do this:

my $file = $class . '.pm';
$file =~ s{::}{/}g;
eval { CORE::require($file) };
confess("Could not load module '$class' because : $@") if $@;
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whenever we need to load a class. But aside from that I don't have a better suggestion.