Symfony/Doctrine: Accessing unmapped(?) data within entity - symfony

Question

in Symfony (5.3.7 at present) I've got main data-entities and settings seperated. For example there is a user entity (default stuff), a TypeUserSetting defining the different settings and UserSetting which is m:n in between with the current setting stored.
namespace App\Entity;
/**
* #ORM\Entity(repositoryClass=TypeUserSettingRepository::class)
*/
class TypeUserSetting
{
/**
* #ORM\Id
* #ORM\GeneratedValue
* #ORM\Column(type="integer")
*/
private $id;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="string", length=200)
*/
private $description;
/**
* #ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity=UserSetting::class, mappedBy="setting")
*/
private $userSettings;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="string", length=255, nullable=true)
*/
private $default_value;
and
class UserSetting
{
/**
* #ORM\Id
* #ORM\GeneratedValue
* #ORM\Column(type="integer")
*/
private $id;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="string", length=4000, nullable=true)
*/
private $value;
/**
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity=User::class, inversedBy="userSettings")
* #ORM\JoinColumn(nullable=false)
*/
private $user;
/**
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity=TypeUserSetting::class, inversedBy="userSettings",cascade={"persist"})
* #ORM\JoinColumn(nullable=false)
*/
private $setting;
Thats not that complicated so far...
My problem is, that oftenly settings don't exist, because the users did not set them. In that case I want to use the default.
class User ...
/**
* #ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity=UserSetting::class, mappedBy="user", orphanRemoval=true)
*/
private $userSettings;
...
public function getSettingById(int $id):string
{
foreach ($this->getUserSettings() as $oneSetting) {
if ($oneSetting->getId() === $id)
return $oneSetting->getValue();
}
//Not set, return the default
....
}
And here we go... If there is no setting, the loop fails and I want to get the default form the coresponding TypeUserSetting. This is not mapped, so I have to get it from the database, but I didn't find a way to access that properly.
Possible solutions I found that far:
Insert the UserSetting for all users by SQL when adding a TypeUserSetting. This would avoid the whole problem, but I simply don't like that.
Adding a static method to the TypeUserSetting-repo to get the value. I think that's ugly and somehow going back to last century...
Inject the TypeUserSetting-repo by LifeCycle-hooks which (in my oppinion) isn't the way entities should be used.
Injecting the repo from the controller that calls the function... I think this would be the opposite of encapsulation and separation of concerns. (and I think about hitting my head to the wall, just for having this kind of thoughts)
Anybody got a good idea to solve that?
Thanks in advance