I think with v6 we should finally fix this up to be consistent with all other frameworks and the intuitive understanding of

• whats actually "public" from the outside, accessible directly
• and whats "under the hood"

This would make CakePHP compatible with
https://github.com/php-pds/skeleton

Symfony, Laravel and the other major PHP frameworks all use this for years, and it also makes the transition from them to Cake easier, as well as provide less hacks needed for dev tools (e.g. ddev needs to customize this internally to fit Cake).