Yes, back in the "old days" of PHP you could ignore ordering and grouping on MySQL and it would pretty reliably give you back things in a stable "order of inser

Yes, back in the "old days" of PHP you could ignore ordering and grouping on MySQL and it would pretty reliably give you back things in a stable "order of insertion" order where there was ambiguity. Of course that was never guaranteed and subsequent optimizations and changes have really removed that ability to ignore order in many situations. Plus, MySQL also changed to actually check if you're doing GROUP BY properly by default. MySQL was always a big part of the PHP story so it's fitting they've followed similar arcs of improvement and growing pains over the years.