Route Improvement in Laravel 8
I recently heard about Laravel 8 changing the way routing was declared, as this video explains that developers upgrading from Laravel 7 or earlier will need to either switch to using the PHP callable syntax or fully namespace the controller in the string syntax (as your first code snippet does) (see the section Routing under Upgrading To 8.0 From 7.x).
Yes adding that use statement at the top then you should be able to reference the class without the namespace before it.
You can use the ::class keyword for name resolution instead of using a string literal:
'uses' =&gt;  [CrewAPIController::class, 'Update'], 

Many populate IDEs will index the class names and allow you to then easily jump to the class definition -e.g. ctrl/command + click on name).

I also wasn't familiar with the 'as' syntax, then I found this comment on this accepted SO answer to What does “as” keyword mean in Laravel routing?

As keyword is in older version, if you change the documentation to 5.2 you can see the as keyword. In newer version it's -&gt;name

So you could use the name() method to make the Named route instead:
Route::post('/update-crew', [CrewAPIController::class, 'Update'])
    -&gt;name('apiUpdateCrew');