Are environments mandatory?

I went through the documentation and it seems that the notion of "environments" is mandatory. In all of our projects we moved away from such paradigm (as did Symfony and Zend/Laminas a long time ago) and use only a non versioned "local" configuration file(s). I was able to fiddle with Phinx so that it's always using "production" but then gets the configuration from a local non versioned file. It's still weird to see the mention of "production" even though we're in development, and I thought it would have been much cleaner to allow not using environments at all. Maybe to allow the database configuration information at the root of the config array in some 'database' key, and if "default_environment" is not found and if the environments is not passed to the CLI commands, then this key must exists and is used for the database connection. This would allow to completely bypass the environment mecanism and any reference of it in the configuration file.

Start by reading the documentation and the configuration handling for database settings, environments, default_environment, and the CLI commands. Trace how the current production environment is selected and how database connections are built. Done means a configuration can place database information at the root, omit environments and default_environment, and use that configuration through the CLI without environment references.