Similar thinking, I've been through much pain from a class hierarchy degrading into an unusable mess, also done a lot of rework refactoring those and it doesn't

Similar thinking, I've been through much pain from a class hierarchy degrading into an unusable mess, also done a lot of rework refactoring those and it doesn't pay off. Instead of inheritance I much rather prefer the composition approach, not extending classes but defining interfaces for the API, using other classes in the composition of an object rather than relying on overrides/implementations from a base class. It's much clearer to reason about (no more 3-4 layers of indirection), easier to refactor as well.