The thing I find most hard about WP development is that there isn't much else you can do. It's like one bootstrap file bootstrapping another, with hooks peppere

The thing I find most hard about WP development is that there isn't much else you can do. It's like one bootstrap file bootstrapping another, with hooks peppered throughout. The majority of your problems will lie in the integration of a handful of plugins. Otherwise, you're better off doing something else. It plays like a out of tune orchestra. Sure I could hook up xdebug. In fact I have in the past. I profiled the beast. The call graph made mu forehead feel like a lead weight. But if I'm working on a project with components of my choosing, I'm free to make liberal use of PHPUnit, both for unit testing and heavier tests that involve the whole stack. Debugging isn't as smooth as debugging JS or typescript so I lean more on logs and object dumps. Might be different if I used PHPStorm but that feels sluggish to use - says something when I use Emacs with tonnes of packages. It is possible to do higher quality programming in PHP but WP isn't a friendly environment for that. And environment goes a long way.