You absolutely can use @ in sane codebases. And you give the example yourself: In other languages you often enough see that boilerplate where thrown exception is discarded, because there is no sane reaction to some edge case and you just want the program to continue, because you know it will work anyway. And that's @.

Note though that @ was already neutered in some earlier recent PHP releases.

This.

One common use case for the @ operator, is when "destructuring" array members into variables. In some cases, you can't know if the member will be available, but it's not important if it's missing. In that case, you can silence the warning.

$array = ['apple', 'pear']; @list($mainFruit, $secondaryFruit, $tertiaryFruit);

Since I suppress the warning that would occur due to the third member not being present, the program will continue executing instead of halting.