This is a preemptive plea for people who last wrote PHP in 2012 not to opine on what writing PHP is like in 2025. It is not a hammer with two claws. It’s a modern language with types and tooling and package management.
They have, in fact, been willing to break backwards compatibility when it matters. mysql_real_escape_string(), for example, my personal favorite bugaboo from the early days, was removed in 2015.