Since we don't have control over external extensions, setting the
flag for each extension is likely necessary.  The additional
wrappers are likely for loose coupling (Zend/* should ideally not
rely on TSRM/*).

Anyhow, I don't think it is helpful to keep this ticket open.  Feel
free to provide pull requests[1] for code cleanup, instead.

[1] <https://github.com/php/php-src/pulls>

> Feel free to provide pull requests
I am not a code contributor, nor am I familiar with the codebase. Submitting TSRM issue #80814 required reverse-engineering its code's purpose, and the excessive amount of macro stacking, wrappers and conditional compilation flags made researching the issue take way longer than it should have. This write-up describes one of the frustrations I had with the code. Unfortunately I do not have any more spare time to invest in this. I might revisit this in the future.

> external extensions
Ah, so third-party extensions come into play here. If I understood right, the STATIC_TSRMLS_CACHE thing is just a cpu optimization to save a few ticks when accessing threaded global variables, so there is no functional difference whether the feature is turned on or off, and thus no real reason to care about it when writing a third-party module. If this is indeed the case, then since every phpext makefile already force enables it, the proposed cleanup would just get rid of all references to the flag and instead set it to 1 inside Zend.h right before the place it's used. If third-party backwards compat is a concern, the header could instead check if the flag is being explicitly set to 0.

> The additional wrappers are likely for loose coupling. Zend should ideally not rely on TSRM.
Staring at that part of Zend.h with this statement in mind, it does seem like all it's doing is implementing an on/off toggle for the cache. What I'm not sure about is why it needs to be in Zend.h, rebranded as ZEND_*. I guess it does implement a sort of loose coupling when the cache feature is turned off and you reaaaaally want to avoid including tsrm.h. This is mainly due to those global setup macros that the cache feature forces onto every module.