Shared nothing architecture. If you're using e.g. fastapi you can store some data in memory and that data will be available across requests, like so

    import uvicorn, fastapi
    
    app = fastapi.FastAPI()
    
    counter = {"value": 0}
    
    @app.post("/counter/increment")
    async def increment_counter():
        counter["value"] += 1
        return {"counter": counter["value"]}
    
    @app.post("/counter/decrement")
    async def decrement_counter():
        counter["value"] -= 1
        return {"counter": counter["value"]}
    
    @app.get("/counter")
    async def get_counter():
        return {"counter": counter["value"]}
    
    if __name__ == "__main__":
        import uvicorn
        uvicorn.run(app, host="0.0.0.0", port=9237)

Non-php toolchains, of course, offer the same upsides if you hold them right. PHP is harder to hold wrong in this particular way, though, and in my experience the upside of eliminating that class of bug is shockingly large compared to how rarely I naively would have expected to see it in codebases written by experienced devs.

From my perspective, negative expectations do have a higher chance of turning out real, but because negative expectations most often are just code for human misalignment. We have some philosophical, instinctual, or aesthetic (etc.) preferences, but then reality is always going to be broader than that. So you're bound to hit things that are in misalignment. It takes active effort to cultivate the world to be whatever particular way. But this is also why I find simple pleas to cynicism particularly hollow. It comes off as resignation, exactly where the opposite is what would be most required.

Atmosphere on the other hand is very thin and mostly concentrated close to surface (half is under 5km) so it's much easier for humans to fuck it up