[0] or similarly easy to get running equivalent

I've seen plenty of those as well - nobody knows exactly how things are setup, sometimes dependencies are quite outdated and people are afraid to touch the cPanel config (or however it's setup). Not that you can't do good engineering with enough discipline, it's just that Docker (or most methods of containerization) limits the blast range when things inevitably go wrong and at least try to give you some reproducibility.

At the same time, I think that PHP can be delightfully simple and I do use Apache2 myself (mod_php was actually okay, but PHP-FPM also isn't insanely hard to setup), it's just that most of my software lives in little Docker containers with a common base and a set of common tools, so they're decoupled from the updates and config of the underlying OS. I've moved the containers (well data+images) across servers with no issues when needed and also resintalled OSes and spun everything right back up.

Kubernetes is where dragons be, though.