All good code starts with the individual. In the PHP world it starts with the collective, not much room for creativity on the assembly line, and any such attempts are met by endless debates over petty code reviews - many of which can be replaced by linters.
Of course i wrote in large teams, thats why i know that a large codebase with hundreds of people working on it is usually a sign of either bad practice (the monolith that grew too much) or high turnover (php work places are often toxic and filled by mediocrity).
Instead of ignoring my advice on maintainability, consider breaking your code into smaller chunks and write less code that doesnt solve self inflicted issues (ie your complex queries across hundreds of tables, dtos that dont solve much, custom functions for stuff that can already be done in sql). Once you do the above you wont need all of the overhead you describe and so specific to php.
My code usually lasts a good number of years, often even after i’m no longer working on it. It’s difficult to break and easy to maintain. At least thats the feedback i get from repeat clients. The teams i lead have easily delivered code that generates returns in the billions. All without the mess you describe.
