To me this is just yelling at clouds.

Things have moved on from PHP, but at the time, the alternatives had many more tradeoffs in a wide range of cases. Without PHP the internet would have unfolded much differently, much more slowly.

The "bandaid" mentality you decry exists of course, and is outright bad in some cases, but is just good business in many others.

Rewriting everything makes no sense. And, of course, in the vast majority of cases is never going to happen, so advocating for that is effectively advocating doing nothing at all for 90%+ of sites. A much more efficient and effective approach to using AI here would be to find and fix issues in the PHP runtime, and to assist in automating the deployment of the runtime. Time spent on this fixes thousands and millions of sites at a time, in a consistent, improvable way, rather than one at a time, in a piecemeal way.

> We're a clown industry

I think if we want to bring more engineering discipline to software development, we need sober analysis, not outraged rants.