Most architecture discussions treat the bus question as global. Either the whole application routes commands and queries through a CQRS bus, or none of it does. That framing forces a bad trade: pay CQRS boilerplate on a homepage that displays a greeting, or drop the bus on a module that genuinely needs events and transactions. The real unit of decision is not the application. It is the module.
"Clean Architecture framework" reads like an oxymoron. Clean Architecture is about independence from frameworks: the framework is a detail you keep at arm's length so your business code never depends on it. A framework, in the usual sense, is the opposite. It imposes its conventions, it lives in vendor/, and you depend on it by version. Someone raised this objection to me, and it is fair. So which one is Phexium?
"Micro-framework" gets sold as simplicity. Pick a router, handle requests, stay out of your way. The reality is different: micro doesn't mean simple, it means incomplete by design. The decisions the framework skips become your decisions - and in a project that grows, those decisions accumulate.
Open a Symfony project and the routes are in YAML. The services are in YAML. The bundles are in PHP, but only as an array of class names. Open a Laravel project and routing lives in PHP, but services hide behind ServiceProviders that wrap bindings inside register() and boot() methods. Both approaches put a layer between you and the configuration, and that layer is where every typo, missing key, and "where is this interface bound" question accumulates.
A controller reaches into middleware to run business logic. It looks convenient. The middleware has the session, the user, the request body, everything you need. So why bounce through a handler when you can just validate the cart right there? Because the moment you do, your business rule only runs inside an HTTP pipeline, and you just lost the ability to invoke it from anywhere else.