What they do is put lipstick on a pig! There is no need to "reduce" the risk of SQL injections when you can use a safe API that eliminates the entire error class. This is a solved problem for the rest of the world!
PHP might seem worse than other languages due to a combination of factors:
- It's the most used one by far, even though few of us like to admit it.
- Old tutorials still come up during web searches, so "SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE id = $id" will still be written today.