Having used PHP since version 4 (20 years ago), I can say with confidence that its had its peak. Everything new added since 7.4 is just fluff or bloat. Fixing long standing bugs and performance improvements is fine, of course. But everything new they introduce adds to the pile of warts that's PHP. I highly regard those that try to improve it, but with the current direction it'll remain the colloquial example of how n…
Exceptions as expressions--I can stop writing, `$x = $context['x'] ?? ThrowWrapper::missingValue('x');`
Named Arguments -- I use a hacky diy `Reflection` heavy version of this for an RMI/dispatch where json key-vals mapped to function params.
Static return type and union types -- I have been relying on PhpStorm docstring hacks for this sort of type-hinting.
`readonly` will be very helpful to express performant, immutable classes. I have a number of classes that are immutable-by-convention, trusting the caller not to monkey with the internals. (The idiomatic way to do this, `$immutable->getAttr()` is too costly in tight loops compared to `$immutable->attr`)
PHP still has lots of warts (function calls why you so aspensive?!?!?) but I keep being pleasantly surprised by how good of a tool it's evolving into.