For fifteen years, Doctrine shaped the way we write entities, and not always for the better. Entities could not be final, because proxies had to extend them. Every field grew a getter and a setter. Domain concepts like money, addresses and identifiers ended up as strings and floats, because mapping anything richer was more trouble than it was worth.

None of that was a design decision. Those were workarounds for things PHP could not express yet.

It can now. Attributes, backed enums, property hooks, asymmetric visibility, native lazy objects, and an arbitrary-precision number object in core. Doctrine ORM 3.4 and DBAL 4.3 pick all of it up, and ORM 4 will be built on it.

We take one realistic entity, too many lines of accessors and primitives, and refactor it live on the slides: final classes, no setters, enums, typed identifiers, embedded value objects, custom DBAL types that register themselves. Same database schema at the end. No migration. Considerably less code.