the very fact that you don't have to think about memory management it means that there is something else taking care of it. Call it GC or otherwise, no PHP dev will be think about memory management at all, unless they are building some long-lived, large data processing
> no PHP dev will be think about memory management at all
Not nowadays, for sure. In 2009-2010 it was still something to keep in mind, and careful array handling was common so the it wouldn't baloon hundreds of megabytes for not so large data structures. I wasn't working on big data (tm) at that time, but running database imports via ETL processes in PHP required a few optimization passes.
I really can appreciate nowadays the huge memory and performance improvements that PHP went through from the 5.x days to the recent 8.1 release.
Sidenote: Shout outs to Nikita Popov who came to the scene and revitalized the language for me back then, for his proposals and features implemented in a time when PHP felt stagnant language wise https://www.npopov.com/aboutMe.html#accepted-php-proposals
i've been working with PHP for almost 20 years and to be honest i've never had to think about memory management until the last 10 years or so and only in case of long running processes (e.g. cronjobs)