Why are "use" statements not working in my PHP scripts?

I'm coming back to PHP after many years and am running into a bit of an odd problem. I'm running PHP 7.1.7 on Windows and am trying to install and utilize the maclof/kubernetes-client library via Composer. I have the following simple code snippet to test things out:

<?php

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use Maclof\Kubernetes\Client;

$path = realpath(__DIR__ . '/kubeconfig.yaml');

// this works (when fully qualified)
$config = Maclof\Kubernetes\Client::parseKubeconfigFile($path);

// but this doesn't
$client = new Client($config);

?>
Copy code

As you can see, when I access the static methodparseKubeconfigFile using the fully-qualified class name (Maclof\Kubernetes\Client), this works. But when I try to just use the shorter name ofClient, it doesn't work. Evenclass_exists("Client") returns false. It's as though PHP is outright ignoring theuse statement, and I don't know why.

What am I missing? Is there some weird php.ini directive that governsuse statements? Or is there some wacky bug in this specific version of PHP? I'm pulling my hair out right now trying to understand why this doesn't work.

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