This is a question or feature request.

I have looked into the documentation and believe that some problems is the result of the axes folder and its structure. I am not sure what is supposed to be automatic and what is not in sphinx but axes.SubplotBase is for example not included in the documentation even though most axes used in matplotlib are probably of that class.

.. automodule:: matplotlib.axes does not work even though Axes and SubplotBase exist in that module.
.. automodule:: matplotlib.axes._subplots works as I would expect but the paths are wrong.

from matplotlib.axes import SubplotBase, Axes works but the class of actual objects are using the full path, for example matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot

I don't know much of module structures or module aliases but I think it is kind of inconvenient when different paths are used in different places and I believe that more work than needed is necessary to write the documentation correctly. See for example #11443.

Is it possibly to get a module structure such that the obj.__class__ path is the same as the alias path, i.e. axes.Axes is always used instead of axes._axes.Axes?