Animate CC 2019 - Layers are now objects in the hierarchy? Help?

After starting a new project with Animate 2019, I was having problems doing something as simple as referring to a MovieClip inside another MovieClip from my Document Class.

trace(parentClip.childClip)

kept returning undefined even though parentClip was added to stage and childClip was a MovieClip inside parentClip.

I couldn't figure it out until I realized that I had to also add the name of the layer that childClip was placed on.

     trace(parentClip.Layer_1.childClip)

succesfully returned the object.

What on earth? Surely there's a way to avoid having to refer to layer names just to get the child clip?