The complexity still has to exist somewhere, right? By avoiding this, they're just keeping it in all the developers' heads, rather than a legacy mode in the compiler.
I'm not sure that's the wrong decision, but it's not a great one, either. Too much complexity in the implementation can kill the project. Too much complexity in the language can kill a person's hope of learning it.
Many complaints are about the PHP standard libraries and not about the language itself, so you can learn the language just fine and just don't learn the old deprecated functions at all unless you hit such a function in a codebase and tehn you research it. . Is not equivalent to compare PHP+ standard library with JS core , PHP included function to read and write files, streams, databases,json,XML, run executables(if enabled), where in JS or other languages most of this functions are not standard.
I'm not sure that's the wrong decision, but it's not a great one, either. Too much complexity in the implementation can kill the project. Too much complexity in the language can kill a person's hope of learning it.