Great breakdown. Supporting cPanel and shared hosting without SSH access is one of the biggest headaches when distributing a modern Laravel + Vue/Inertia application to non-technical end users.

While building KondoManager (an open-source property management system in Laravel 13), I had to engineer around these exact cPanel limitations so users could deploy and maintain it without touching the terminal:

1. Zero-CLI Onboarding & Updates: We built a dedicated Web Installer wizard and an in-app automated updater protected by a "Double Lock" mechanism (combining a file-level config lock with a database digital lock) to run migrations and updates safely via browser.

2. Bypassing .env fragility: Updating .env files programmatically on shared hosting is error-prone and risks breaking updates. We moved dynamic configs and sensitive API keys into encrypted database settings, keeping .env strictly minimal.

3. Pre-packaged Releases & Cron: Since most cPanel plans lack Node.js or enough RAM for Composer, our release artifacts ship with pre-compiled Vite assets and scoped vendor dependencies, plus an encrypted token endpoint to trigger scheduled tasks when standard CLI cron struggles.

If anyone is looking for a real-world reference on how to structure a Laravel app to survive shared hosting, feel free to check out how we handled it in our repo: https://github.com/vince844/kondomanager-free