it does look like a cache problem. So from what I can tell it only happens in your gitlab actions, in the pipeline? And you're running cache:clear and it still happens?
#Encountering "Auth driver [sanctum] for guard [sanctum] is not defined." in CI Pipeline
sturdy tide
Just for reference this is all the "clearing" we do in our deployment pipeline, maybe test some of those?
php artisan clear-compiled
php artisan optimize
php artisan config:cache
php artisan cache:clear
Got it. And I assume that all tests work fine when running locally?
fossil stump
Where are you enabling the stateful API middleware
raven silo
I mean, I would probably separate out your jobs a bit into different workflows
Running PHPStan, then Rector, then Pest-Test, then Dusk-Tests seems a bit daft
Given that you're checking out the code each time, installing the requiremetns, preparing the dependencies, installing npm etc
most of which are not needed for most of your workflow actions
Split them out, and they'll run in parallel, will be much faster to complete etc
Your PHPUnit job for example, does not need NPM
As for sanctum, I can't see it in your composer.json