PHP 8.5

PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow.

I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.

IMO, newer PHP is still very readable. I programmed with C++ for a decade, but I can safely say that I cannot understand a modern C++ code base anymore.

Are the new features really readable? I have no idea what this code from the OP is meant for:

    #[SkipDiscovery(static function (Container $container): bool {
        return ! $container->get(Application::class) instanceof ConsoleApplication;
    })]
    final class BlogPostEventHandlers
    { /* … */ }

As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#". See https://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures_in_const_expr