With no luck finding a function; here is the one I wrote:
It will evenly distribute items into a fixed amount of groups but also keeps items that were sorted close together to be in the same output groups.
<?php
function distributed_array_chunk(array $items, int $groups, bool $preserveKeys = false) {

    $grouped = [];
    $groupsPerItem = $groups /  count($items);
    $progress = 0.00;

    foreach ($items as $key => $value) {

        $index = floor($progress += $groupsPerItem);

        if ($preserveKeys) {
            $grouped[$index][$key] = $value;
        }
        else{
            $grouped[$index][] = $value;
        }    
    }

    return $grouped;
}
?>