[Klathmon]

But then that means breaking backwards compatibility, stranding huge parts of the internet on older versions, splitting the community into "pre-massive-change" and "post-massive-change", and a LOT of work by both PHP maintainers and "users" for what will end up being a marginal increase in dev happiness and practically zero material benefit for anyone.

And that still doesn't solve the problem of bad blog posts... You can't control what others write about the language, and if someone writes some posts or has a website with bad information, the maintainers of the language can't "fix" that. The best they can do is what they already do, make sure the PHP documentation is among the best and most approachable of the languages that I've used.