[feeela]

What is the benefit of this?

Right now I see an example of how to write unreadable and hard-to-debug code

Being a senior PHP dev I would not let pass such code into our master branch, mainly because it is syntactic sugar that does not help with a specific problem and also does not attribute to a clearer and readable code at all.

Remember: In a company, where we rely on the code to earn our living the two factors readbilty and testabilty are the single most important ones. Because if you are off to holiday and your coworkers can't get a grasp of your (seemingly) clever code, than the whole company has a problem.