I started working on wordpress plugins with PHP and from the little i’ve gathered seems like any client would be able to download the plugin and access the code.

Are there any option to protect the plugin beyond obfuscation?
The best I can think of is to create an external API where the plugin’s functions can be called from but that would probably slow down the website too much if it waits for API calls.
Is there anyway to make the PHP file protected or protect the plugin protected so the code won’t be downloaded?
There’s shockingly not a lot of results regarding wordpress plugin protection/obfuscation.