Hell, there's still a lot of 5.x deployments out there that work just fine. I even manage one or two (both of them being very old, legacy installations in enterprises. In both cases I'm making slow and steady progress to getting them up to 7.x or 8.x so that we can benefit from engine improvements etc).
> Why would anyone in their right mind use a language ecosystem where each major version upgrade breaks their code
That. Is. The. Entire. Point. Of. Major. Versions.
A big red warning and culutral understanding of "stuff we said would be gone, that we gave you a year+ of notice on, is now gone, go read the migration notes if you've been sleeping under a rock."
You act like this is happening monthly? 8.0 came out in Nov 2020... , 7.0 was Dec 2015.
> I just don't understand why people accept this from their tools.
Actually our tooling is pretty nice. Between psalm, phpcs and rector, we have tooling that can forwarn of deprecations in use, and most of the time fix them automatically.
Should you always use PHP? No. But the debate on the nuances as to when to not use it doesn't tend to go well with those who just throw everything out the pram acting like PHP developers are insane because it's not a haskell/rust docker project.