I mean, the same is true of javascript, part and parcel of having a low barrier to entry is that people who put low effort into their work can use it... As to

I mean, the same is true of javascript, part and parcel of having a low barrier to entry is that people who put low effort into their work can use it... As to how we're sorting that; pretty much the only major project I can think of that I'd describe as "actively legacy" in its codebase/style is WordPress, and that's a hairy discussion around moving forward vs. backwards compatibility of their plugin/theme ecosystem which is their primary USP. Practically every other serious project has moved to the composer/PSR-4 autoloading model, and a lot of them also make use of static analysis/linting tools to squash potential bugs and enforce standards. If you're a web dev company that values maintainable code you can weed out these legacy slapdashers in recruiting. And those legacy projects out in the wild? Not my concern until someone brings one to us saying they want x feature added, we point out the Y,Z and Q faults / security issues with their slapdash code, and negotiate a price on a sane rebuild that'll be maintainable going forward. It may be a bit of mess, but it's being made better little by little each day, and the naysayers can complain about PHP all they want, I'm still getting paid to write PHP.