Could you give a realistic example?

The PHP pipes as described in the articles about it will require a bunch of wrapping anyway so you could just do that. There are several alternatives, from a function or method that just converts from raw array to class, to abstractions involving stuff like __invoke, __call, dispatchers and such.

Also the expectation to not have to put facades on libraries is a bit suspicious, in my experience it is very common. I find it unlikely you actually want to use raw arrays instead of leveraging type guards in your code.

If I use Laravel’s Str in an app where both myself and a third party library want to add a chainable method, how do I make the API make sense? We can’t both subclass Str. The only option I see is Macroable and that’s a rabbit hole I’d rather avoid.