Eh, your statement is accurate for PHP4 and still relevant up to PHP5.2... We're on PHP8.3 now and PHP8.0 is now out of security updates. I know it's trend to hate on PHP but you've got to at least update your materials to var-vars... it's like knocking node for having substr() and substring().
2 years ago I tried to give a drupal project the ci/cd makeover (i.e. containers, test-deployments, reproducable builds, etc)... that's when my hate was freshly renewed.
At this point I think it's ok to let a dead language die and move on to something else (anything else, really)