Composer suffers some of the same issues NPM does, IMO: it encourages stuff like 'install dependencies at deployment' and "why write it when you can blindly trust someone else's code".
I’d argue that the only “the” is one that’s distributed with it, which is PEAR. I’m not saying PEAR is used more or that it’s better, just that it’s the only one close to “default” with the language distributions.
I don't like that PEAR by default needs administrator privileges and installs packages into system directories. That's inconvenient because you might have many PHP applications, and each needs different versions of dependencies. What did PEAR developers think? That I will be working on a single app for whole life?
Installing libraries globally is inconvenient for developers. Sadly, most Linux package managers have same problem and do not allow you to install several versions of PHP or Node.
PEAR installation will be disabled by default in PHP 7.4, see https://externals.io/message/103977. It was a good tool, once, but the community has moved on.
pear/pecl are more for installing extensions TO php in my experience, where composer is for installing packages built IN php, so composer is more the defacto community package manager, pear/pecl are useful though when you need to install gmp, gdi, intl, etc on your local dev environment. I don't know anyone who uses pear to install carbon or guzzle, or any other php package though.
a package distribution system.
Composer suffers some of the same issues NPM does, IMO: it encourages stuff like 'install dependencies at deployment' and "why write it when you can blindly trust someone else's code".
Not everyone who uses PHP uses Composer.