I've come very close to be the "sir" mentioned in the article (for hobby stuff only though), luckily always I did catch myself and was able to stop before it was too late. I decided at some point that I do not want to build a compiler/transpiler, and if I do some day, I want for it to be a conscious decision and not an accident like in the article.

It starts innocently, e.g. doing some template files and replacing some simple values, then you start to have to do more replacements and more "smart" parsing and then at some point it's too late, as the article suggests.

TBF, I did put together a transpiler from PHP to JS, but I didn't build it, just found the different pieces that luckily fit together and hacked around it enough that it could run in the browser.