Every human-readable programming language must be compiled into some sort of bytecode (opcode in PHP) and/or machine language in order to work. The question is

Every human-readable programming language must be compiled into some sort of bytecode (opcode in PHP) and/or machine language in order to work. The question is whether a human ever needs to be aware of that step. In PHP, you generally don't. In the aforementioned setup, you don't need to be aware of SCSS compilation and minification, either. Not even if you use devtools, because the map file will point to the correct line in the original source.