This has been a pain point for a long time due to the misleading nature of the name "level". It's also confusing when trying to do things like getting the XP level of the player or such, and also does not translate well to other languages.
This transition was already executed on the UI some time ago (language strings) and now it's time for the same change to occur on the API.
This will burn a lot of plugins, but they'll acclimatize. Despite the scary size of this PR, there isn't actually so many changes to make. Most of this came from renaming `Position->getLevel()` to `Position->getWorld()`, or cosmetic changes like changing variable names or doc comments.
This is better for performance because these then don't need to be reevaluated every time they are called.
When encountering an unqualified function or constant reference, PHP will first try to locate a symbol in the current namespace by that name, and then fall back to the global namespace.
This short-circuits the check, which has substantial performance effects in some cases - in particular, ord(), chr() and strlen() show ~1500x faster calls when they are fully qualified.
However, this doesn't mean that PM is getting a massive amount faster. In real world terms, this translates to about 10-15% performance improvement.
But before anyone gets excited, you should know that the CodeOptimizer in the PreProcessor repo has been applying fully-qualified symbol optimizations to Jenkins builds for years, which is one of the reasons why Jenkins builds have better performance than home-built or source installations.
We're choosing to do this for the sake of future SafePHP integration and also to be able to get rid of the buggy CodeOptimizer, so that phar and source are more consistent.