Because any version of PHP that removed gotched and made the APIs consistent would break compatibility - and at that stage you're pretty close to moving to a di

Because any version of PHP that removed gotched and made the APIs consistent would break compatibility - and at that stage you're pretty close to moving to a different ecosystem in the first place. Look at Py3 vs Py2. At the end of the day, the way I see it, the true advantage of PHP was its lower barrier to entry. Now that this has mostly been resolved via PaaS hosting, it seems to me we're moving to a word where Node is the new default, because Javascript.