Sorry my comment was very imprecise: I actually agree with you and the general assessment of modern PHP (see below). What I wanted to say is that I feel like

Sorry my comment was very imprecise: I actually agree with you and the general assessment of modern PHP (see below). What I wanted to say is that I feel like it is slightly misleading to advertise these things as bad practices if the audience is unknown. For example a beginner should probably just stick with the default idiom of a language/domain/project and understand it first, before adhering to advice given in these kinds of articles. PHP just has too many footguns so you either go with modern idioms or you are experienced enough to avoid them _safely_. Also there is the issue of documentation and learning. --- PHP is almost never my language of choice, but since I do freelance work it chooses me more often than I would like. The language is more expressive than many think and has some nice and sometimes unique useful features. But it is so inconsistent (in many ways) that your code is already ugly _before_ you start writing it (as opposed to after). That said I personally dislike writing overly abstract "OO-everywhere" programs and in my opinion PHP is _specifically_ unfit for this kind of style, since it is stateless, so everything you need to load before you do actual work, becomes a continuous performance hit (unlike for example Java, which also starts to get very fast once the JVM is warmed up). There are abstractions and utilities that absolutely make sense when dealing with PHP though: - Response & request handling with routing (parameters etc.) and middleware abstractions, including convenience for session handling and validation. - A sane abstraction over building HTTP requests (if needed). - SQL query builders (if needed) for convenience, increased safety and better error reporting. PDO is still a bit too error prone to use and is inconvenient compose. - DB migrations (if needed). - A convenient logging library. - A collection library. Built in PHP array functions are very inconsistent, straight up weird in terms of naming/functionality and incomplete in terms of what you'd expect there to be. - File handling uploads, streaming etc. (if needed). - You definitely want to use composer and auto-loading. - Probably _some_ more but you get the drift. A framework will give you all of these things (hopefully) plus a whole bunch of stuff you don't need (like ORMs, DI, code generators, template engines etc.)