I never heard of the abstract/final thing, except maybe from one or two coworkers that don't produce much but talk about the language all day and will berate yo

I never heard of the abstract/final thing, except maybe from one or two coworkers that don't produce much but talk about the language all day and will berate you about protected/private or ordering your "use" alphabetically. It's true that the PHP community has a bit of an inferiority complex which result sometimes in abuse of patterns, like suddenly someday everyone wanted to do refactor everything with DDD/CQRS/etc for no good reason.