The modern ecosystem (Symfony 3/4 especially) and practices enabled by 7.0+ are good, but all the old horror is still lurking behind the curtain, and there's no

The modern ecosystem (Symfony 3/4 especially) and practices enabled by 7.0+ are good, but all the old horror is still lurking behind the curtain, and there's not much to prevent naive coders from writing garbage like it's 1999. It's not that dissimilar from the Javascript situation, where you have some people still writing spaghetti jquery in random globally-namespaced places and some people in basically a whole other world writing type-checked and compiled modular code. Some important things like sensible fast native data types (php-ds) are still in extensions instead of core because they're recent developments, and there are still a lot of traps and dead-ends from past failures in the standard library, but it's improving with each release. The addition of sodium to core in 7.2 is a really important step forward.