First, let me say that I do agree with this post. PHP projects are more often than not full of inelegant solutions written by bad programmers. The "running background tasks in the foreground" is a good example; one that I _hate_ seeing in production.

The thing that I don't agree with though, is that you've described a "capable" programmer who uses good programming techniques and obviously knows how to structure an application. If this programmer is doing the "background-in-foreground" thing and hasn't heard of message queues, then I would argue that they aren't a capable programmer - in which case you're just describing bad programming practices; not a fundamental flaw of PHP.