[philipwhiuk]

> No more random scattering of SQL statements in HTML files!

And yet you will still find this, because the long-tail of bad PHP is near infinite.

> although ideally all code from the 5.3 era should be burned at the stake

I guarantee you that a decent amount of real PHP coding right now is maintaining legacy stuff, not the new fangled 8.

It is, of course, the same in the Java world - most of the day job is not using Java 17. It's just that Java 6 code forced onto Java 8 isn't as bad as PHP 4 code hacked into PHP 5 code still struggling along in PHP 9. (Especially because as a scripting language, it will more likely fail at runtime, not build-time).