> PHP in theory has namespaces, but the standard libraries are just dumped in global.

Modern PHP development almost exclusively uses Composer libraries rather than the standard libraries, which overwhelmingly use namespaces in Vendor\Project format.

There's going to be a push to clean up the standard library in the coming years. The plan is to introduce a namespaced alternative to the standard library in the global namespace which also cleans up a lot of nits (e.g. phpsadness.com posts). Maybe in PHP 8? Then when the ecosystem catches up, we can discuss deprecating/removing the "just dumped in global" way of doing things in PHP 9.

Source: I'm very likely going to be the main person driving this push.