Reasons to hate frameworks number 8497584375984398536837532874328759: because of the layer upon layers of abstraction, I can't find the cause of the problem anywhere.
Despite having deleted a variable throughout all the controllers, models, routes, and views, and even terminated it out of the MySQL database, the interpreter STILL expects that variable that no longer exists.
After wasting hours grepping throughout all the folders, the problem apparently exists in the cache of that retarded framework (all frameworks are retarded though).
FUCK!!

The so-called "modern way of doing things" is just code word for "let's make everybody's life as miserable as possible just to please the normies who shouldn't even be coding in the first place".