Have you ever watched Ken Burns' Brooklyn Bridge [0]? That doc struck me as straight-jacket-in-a-padded-room insane. The bridge's designer John A Roebling [1] was a Prussian who seems mostly self-educated (who wasn't in 1820? lol) and kind of learned by doing / invented "on the job". Successfully built a couple bridges, dreamed up the mega-project and started building it using caissons [2], then died with it unfinished due to personal injury and hubris. His son took over and completed the bridge, but was plagued by poor health as a result of caisson disease from the Brooklyn Bridge project until his death. Throughout its history, there were concerns about safety, repairs made, upgrades made .. and as a result, there it still is today, as good as it ever was and used daily by zillions of people.

I bring this up because it's the first thing that popped into my head thinking about PHP's legacy. And, admittedly maybe it's not the best analogy, but when people shit on the caissons that bridged the internet because it seems crazy in hindsight to continue use those techniques, shit dreamed up by wacky people to do the impossible, or maybe said we should tear it down and build it a different way, the reality is that sometimes you just leave the bridge in place and improve where you can. It's still standing, you know?

I might be stretching here with all this, but despite you making some very defensible points, I just don't buy into the whole narrative. Just because retrospection has blessed us with the ability to intellectually point out that we built things on quicksand doesn't mean that there were real alternatives to build on at the time. The ease and speed that things like PHP provide(d) allowed enough things to be created to make the web as we know it coalesce into existence in the first place. Pedantic or more expensive or arguably safer choices easily could have slowed progress to a crawl, OR you just build the bridge and see if it's still standing 143 years later.

And in some cases, it is.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/brooklyn-bridge

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Roebling

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_(engineering)