[Fizzlemizz]

The addition of the addon table (Namespace if you will) was exactly to avoid the situation of having to create functions and data as global if you only wanted to share it between other modules in your addon. If an addon only has one .lua file or doesn't have code to share within the addon, it doesn't need to use the addon table.

That's the authors choice.

The only way you can access addon table data from other addons is if you edit the code and make a reference to it in the global table, as you showed or if the author has placed a reference to it in the global table or in another table that is also global (like a frame).