I get your point but I disagree with your timeline. 2012 was already past 5.3 which was a long-lived version with most of the quirks of early 5 fixed.

There was a lot of what people call modern PHP, basically just without the types. I'd say the PHP 4 days are the darker ages that most people reference, but maybe your experience in 2012 was like 2007ish. (TLDR: If you found it fine in 2012 it's probably still fine in 2025, but I don't see the huge wins. I stopped using it for reasons other than "dislike").

I picked 2012 because that’s when the claw hammer discourse was happening, but I agree with you. You could write pretty nice-looking PHP by 2012, and a lot of people did. The claw hammer thing was itself looking back at PHP from several years before.