I liked this so I wanted to make it an entry.

We made a trait for testing that aligns any iterable, most notably Entities, Collections and arrays, and its contents to a more comparable array, with dates casted to strings and BackedEnums to their values.

It looks kinda like this:

/**
 * Aligns a given, possibly multidimensional, iterable and its contents to a more comparable array
 *
 * @param iterable $items Any iterable value such as arrays, Collections and Entities
 * @return array<mixed> The given iterable aligned to a more comparable array
 */
public function typeAlignIterable(iterable $items): array
{
    if ($items instanceof CollectionInterface || $items instanceof EntityInterface) {
        $items = $items->toArray();
    }
 
    return array_map(static function ($item) {
        if ($item instanceof DateTime || $item instanceof DateTimeImmutable) {
            return $item->format('Y-m-d H:i:s.u T');
        }
        if ($item instanceof Date) {
            return $item->format('Y-m-d T');
        }
        if ($item instanceof BackedEnum) {
            return $item->value;
        }
        if (is_iterable($item)) {
            return self::typeAlignIterable($item);
        }
 
        return $item;
    }, $items);
}

Now we can use this base function to write custom assertions that takes any iterable value, aligns it to a comparable array and then also directly compares it to a given array (that doesn't need to contain weird objects to be correct)

The assertion looks like this:

    /**
     * Asserts if given value, which has its self and its contents aligned to be comparable, equals given expected value
     *
     * @param array $expected The expected result in an array
     * @param iterable|EntityInterface $actual The actual iterable data
     * @param string $message Optional message
     * @return void
     */
    public function assertSameTypeAlignedArray(
        array $expected,
        iterable|EntityInterface $actual,
        string $message = ''
    ): void {
        $alignedActual = $this->typeAlignedArray($actual);
 
        self::assertEquals($expected, $alignedActual, $message);
    }