That advice doesn't always work in real life; otherwise for every compiler or linter check in any language, we could drop all those checks and tell the programm

That advice doesn't always work in real life; otherwise for every compiler or linter check in any language, we could drop all those checks and tell the programmers not to do that. E.g. if a base class declares a variable it can potentially break its children. Whose at fault here? I agree with your original comment though. And if the bypass of exisitng fields is badly wanted, somehow marking __get to disregard them makes more sense to me.