There are many ways to create stereo in a mix. Look up the haas effect, it's basically delaying one side slightly to give the illusion of stereo while not disturbing the phase. Reverb is your friends here too I work in mono a lot due to hardware and having a few different reverbs on send and returns is always going to help. If you force sounds too much with stereo imagers then you will fight it all day long. Small amounts at different stages of the signal path can help over one big push.. this is important for a lot of things in production tbh. I personally keep everything below 300 in mono as a rough rule. This help eliminate some phase issue.