It is not outdated at all. You can accomplish this using the App: build and point to your subfolders. For example, if you want to put all your Twitter models in Model / Twitter to save your code, you can add the following to bootstrap.php:
App::build(array(
'Model' => array(APP . 'Model' . DS . 'Twitter' . DS),
));
Now any model file that you put on Model / Twitter will be available when you name it.
: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-utility-libraries/app.html#App::build