And for many of us, these 25 year old warts are a benefit...
Rather than just "fixing" json_decode and breaking backwards compatibility, old code still works.
The business doesn't care about the new shiny. When someone pays to have a simple site developed, they don't want to be paying a contractor in a year to have a bunch of stuff updated so the language it's written in is "more correct" or whatever the overriding reason is to change this. That is completely tangential to what they care about.
I recently went through "modernizing" a 15 year old, 1.93 million line php 5.x app.
We put in a shim for the mysql_ extension as it had been depreciated with 7.x, and fixed up maybe a dozen places where it was doing something exceptionally wacky and then tested like crazy and sent it out the door. Works fine.
The business doesn't care that the code is shit. They care that it makes them a million dollars a month and no matter how gross it is there's no defensible rationale as to why they should stop doing things that make them more money for the next 2-3 years while a team goes through and rebuilds the entire thing to be "more correct".
Something like pyenv/nvm/etc doesn't exist for PHP. You can just install the latest version and with very few exceptions whatever code/library/etc you find will just work. There's a lot more value in that in the real world than "fixing" json_decode.
Rather than just "fixing" json_decode and breaking backwards compatibility, old code still works.
The business doesn't care about the new shiny. When someone pays to have a simple site developed, they don't want to be paying a contractor in a year to have a bunch of stuff updated so the language it's written in is "more correct" or whatever the overriding reason is to change this. That is completely tangential to what they care about.
I recently went through "modernizing" a 15 year old, 1.93 million line php 5.x app.
We put in a shim for the mysql_ extension as it had been depreciated with 7.x, and fixed up maybe a dozen places where it was doing something exceptionally wacky and then tested like crazy and sent it out the door. Works fine.
The business doesn't care that the code is shit. They care that it makes them a million dollars a month and no matter how gross it is there's no defensible rationale as to why they should stop doing things that make them more money for the next 2-3 years while a team goes through and rebuilds the entire thing to be "more correct".
Something like pyenv/nvm/etc doesn't exist for PHP. You can just install the latest version and with very few exceptions whatever code/library/etc you find will just work. There's a lot more value in that in the real world than "fixing" json_decode.