It always depends on the situation, but I do value the stateless approach "by default" of PHP because it makes shoddy code / legacy code that has grown through

It always depends on the situation, but I do value the stateless approach "by default" of PHP because it makes shoddy code / legacy code that has grown through generations of uninterested developers much easier to deal with. I of course value at least partial "stateless" (functional core / hexagonal architecture, event driven architecture) in any language, because they reduce complexity so much.