This is a canard, really. The PDO library, which is a core PHP module, has SQL injection mitigation built-in (with escaped parameter substitution). It was intro

This is a canard, really. The PDO library, which is a core PHP module, has SQL injection mitigation built-in (with escaped parameter substitution). It was introduced with PHP 5 in 2004. The popular PHP frameworks such as Laravel and CodeIgniter also protect against SQL injection and XSS by default. The MySQL escape functions are named the way they are because that's what they are called in the MySQL API, which PHP exposes pretty much verbatim. I don't see a lot of people using that interface in new PHP code (because Laravel and PDO), but it comes up on older code. Again the problem is not obscure function names or that PHP makes it possible to shoot yourself in the foot. The problem is a whole lot of inexperienced programmers (and quite a few who should know better) not understanding the problem in the first place. If you don't know what SQL injection is or how it happens or how code can make it possible you aren't going to know how to protect against it. PHP does do it for you if you use PDO (more than 15 years old at this point), or any of the numerous other safe RDBMS libraries. This is like complaining that Honda makes shitty cars because some people put glass packs and spoilers on a Civic -- people use languages and tools wrong out of ignorance and inexperience. I think it's clear that PHP has been taken seriously for some time, even if largely because of WordPress. It's not going to die off or get relegated to the language ghetto because it has some (obvious, well-known) flaws that serious programmers have known how to live with for literally decades. Regardless of what you think or see on Upwork, PHP contractors are not cheap. No one who can and will work on legacy code is cheap because most programmers won't even do that work if they can help it. Supporting legacy software, which includes improving and securing and upgrading it, is maybe the most lucrative and secure niche for programmers sitting there in plain sight.