I know this might be an unpopular view here, but declarative(ish) constructs like class give a little hope that programs will be more statically analyzable so that we can get nice things like static type checking and warnings, code completion, optimizing compilers, etc.

These types of imperative patterns make life extremely hard on tools, which now need to add in unreliable things like escape analysis to be able determine which classes are visible. Modules will help a little with explicit exports, so that the importing modules have some hope of tooling, but analysis within a module would suffer.