It looks like the author's memory of PHP stopped before modern standards were established. Which is to be expected, since they probably left PHP a long time ago

It looks like the author's memory of PHP stopped before modern standards were established. Which is to be expected, since they probably left PHP a long time ago to become an evangelist for another language/framework. Here "PHP" is used as a generic term for "whatever crap we called web programming back in the 00s." Or maybe just "WordPress."