How would you fix this without breaking most PHP code out there?
How would you fix ==, > and < behaviour without breaking most PHP code out there?
How would you fix Unicode without breaking most PHP code out there?
If PHP fixed things like this, it would be a decent programming language, but it would also break a lot of things. Kinda of like what python3 did, only that it didn't have to break quite so much, since python2 was already pretty decent.
imho python3 fixed the issue in the wrong way, so it will never have a great amount of users: down the road the choice will be upgrade to python3 or choose a more modern programming language like go with immense performance boost. I think people will choose to leave python.
This is nonsense, PHP 7 contains a long list of backwards-compatibility breaks:
http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.php
If PHP 7.0 didn't break anything, it would have been called 5.7.
The upgrade is easy simply because these breaks do not have as much of an impact as Python's did.