Of course, In my team every front-end after update the repo runs a single shell to:
- update composer dependencies
- run migrations
- launch cakephp server
- launch frontend watcher (gulp/webpack/etc)
They don’t touch (almost, only template variables) php, only frontend. I guess twig maybe easier than ctp files
AFAIK Vue is the most easier to learn, also its not mandatory to build a SPA, you can include it only in the main parts of the projects (eg: main module, reporting/dashboards). Simply add the scripts tags and done