PHP did extensions and PECL modules wrong, due to its roots as a web server language. With managed hosting, often PHP doesn't offer what we might think of as basic functionality, since the admin didn't install/enable it. So it makes sense that these little one-off packages exist to route around snafus.

It's still my favorite language though, since it comes closest to shell language but with C-style syntax (other than maybe Perl, which is a write-only language and hard to read, which unfortunately inspired Ruby to inherit some anti-patterns).

I often dream about writing a modern hacker language that combines the best of everything like functional programming, higher-order methods, const by default, parallelism, sync blocking rather than async nonblocking concurrency, etc. It would also undo the pass-by-reference footguns added by PHP 5+ and return to the pass-by-value copy-on-write style of arrays. That's why I really can't endorse attempts like Hack which just introduce a new standard with its own problems.

The insight being that LLMs work around the limitations of mainstream languages and frameworks, rather than challenging assumptions from first principles and building better foundations.