I find those double underscore kwargs weird too, and would prefer to simply pass a lambda instead. What is your idea, what would you suggest?

In Doctrine the query builder can take objects that describe what you want to do [1], not the best but still way better to read and understand. There's also the DQL which is an SQL-like language that's pretty well integrated in phpstorm and is quite close to SQL [2]

[1] https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-collectio... (for collections but you can use them for queries too)

[2] https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/3.... / https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/3....

The double underscore kwargs are a bit odd, I agree, but once you know about them they're okay.

And, rather like the petrol engine, it turns out while it sucks, everything else is massively worse in some vitally important way.