Is there still a php.ini that allows you to alter the language’s semantics? To me, that’s the biggest can of worms that PHP used to have. I haven’t touched it in years, so am not up to date.
Care to explain what you mean it's broken if disabled? That it is disabled (noop in runtime) so you're missing it? AFAIK that's the production setting. You should be able to enable it in build/test/ci/development, just how you want it.
But that might just be me and/or my particular use case.