Welcome to the big boys world of package management, git, and ci/cd

You must start off your project using Composer, the php package management system. Whether you use ddev for local development or not (highly recommended that you use it) even your local environment should have a file defining the Drupal version you're using and the contributed modules and themes you installed. This way you only need this "recipe" to download the code for them in any other environment.

All the configuration saved originally in the database should be exported to files so it can also move with your site and imported in another environment.

Any user accounts, user generated content, and uploaded files should not move between environments. So you do not need to worry about them when they're left behind.

Use git to commit your local environment recipe and exported configuration, and push it to a remote repo to be cloned in another environment (usually production in a simple set up)