I'm criticizing, because it's funny. I'm just trying to figure out if theres some wisdom being conveyed that I'm missing.
At least PHP is not a language known for massive over-engineering. Usually people associate the exact contrary with PHP.
But there is indeed a recent trend towards better object oriented designs in PHP and with it comes also more over-engineered code. But I have yet to see any Java-style absurdity. Maybe we'll still get to that ;)
Then you probably haven't tried Zend Framework ;)
The only one i can think of is object type hinting which alone isn't that big of a deal.
Well, I can't talk for the author, but there is some over-egineering going on in the ecosystem, that's undeniable. I think that since the reputation of the language is low, there's this need to make sure the code doesn't look amateur, which ultimately drives overusing classes and OOP design patterns for the sake of using them.