Apart of the fact that WordPress itself is one big hack, my most creative hacky solution was making it (dev) environment friendly.

First, I created a DB pull and push tool in NodeJS (on TypeScript). Then, because WP is so clever and stores internal URLs in full length in the DB, I had to create a DB migrator (find & replace) and attached it to the DB pull task.
After this, of course WP still has its config in one file, so I used composer to install phpdotenv and filled the config with environment variables.
Bundled with some good ol' Gitlab CI/CD magic, the website is now 10% sanely developable.

It feels like having to shovel piles of shit, but with a golden shovel. Everything stinks as hell but at least there is a tiny bling to it, temporarily.

But in all seriousness: WordPress is a god damn fucking pile of tumors!