"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?
You open a test file you wrote six months ago. It takes ten minutes to figure out what the test actually verifies. The mock setup is dense, the expectations are chained, the matchers are generic. The intent is buried under the mechanics.
Most MVC PHP projects skip the Presenter. The controller fetches an entity, passes it to a template, and the template handles the rest: formatting dates, computing labels, picking CSS classes from status values. It feels pragmatic at first. It rarely stays that way.
"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.