I think tests in general are good, just not TDD as it forces you to what I think bad and narrow paradigm of thinking. I think e.g. it is better that I build the thing, then get to 90%+ coverage once I am sure this is what I would also ship.

I think there is a difference whether you do TDD or write tests after the fact to avoid regression. TDD can only work decently if you already know your specs very well, but not so much when you still need to figure them out, and need to build something actual to be able to figure it out.

You can build those things in modern frameworks, it will just be more headache and will feel outdated in 6 months.

I am not laughing about PHP. To this very day many of my best projects are built on PHP. And while last 7 years I have spent in full stack JavaScript/TypeScript environment it has never produced the same things I was actually able to do with PHP.

I actually feel that things I built 15 years ago in PHP were better than anything I am trying to achieve with modern things that gets outdated every 6 months.

Definitely need to stop squashing commits if that is the case! But no, seriously tracking git commit counts is absolutely ridiculous. Maybe you can have AI autonomously work on useless documentation that no one will read, with 1 commit per 100 lines of markdown?