This ensures that numeric fields appear in PHP as int/float values
rather than strings, which allows the development of more type-safe PHP
code.
This doesn’t work on the legacy mysql driver and this will now throw
a notice-level error. It requires mysqlnd.
Some small performance optimisations (not using callables in loops, switch strval for string
casting), Config call updates and replace call_user_func_array with direct variadic call.
Also removes some redundant else statements after returns.
