In Common Lisp, files are in fact "modules" (or "compilation units") also. To treat multiple files as one unit, you have to use the with-compilation-unit macro:

http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/m_w_comp.htm

The packaging systems people use nowadays over CL are not a part of CL. The whatever subjective suckage they introduce is their own. If you want racket-style modules, hack them up.

The grandparent's observation that "modularization/package management turned out to be too verbose and archaic for my taste" is very ironic --- in particular, the "archaic" part. ASDF is from around the turn of the century (the 21st that is).

The big hurdle in CL modularization is something very trivial: the fact that a file cannot refer to neighboring files easily by a short path. There is no

  (load "foo")

which will look for a "foo" in the same directory as the file which is invoking the load form.

This steers package management toward the external mode, whereby some definition exists outside of all the files and handles their inter-dependencies and the manner of actually locating the groups of files.

I fixed this in TXR Lisp, and so simple modularization is a cinch! You load some main file, and that just does (load "foo") (load "bar") ... to load its related files, no matter where they have been located.

I made load a macro, and that macro accesses the source file location at macro-expansion time, imbuing it into the resulting form that actually does the loading when evaluated. If the load path is relative, then the caller's path is used to resolve it, rather than the current working directory.