

Well, that’s historical, if PHP was being designed today, I think a lot of the things would look very different. As everything since version 7.x, this is a step in the right direction of making the language modern and safer to use.
Like, this is still PHP, both of these are equally valid:
<?php
function hello(string $name): string {
return "Hello, {$name}!";
}
function hello($name) {
return "Hello, $name!";
}
So anything that makes it possible to write a good, clean code is a great addition, IMO.
Same, but given how seriously they take BC breaks, I don’t really see it happening. Well, at least we have mature tooling to avoid having horrible code in production code-bases.