As somebody who used PHP through that transition, I have to say that the 5-7 (skipping 6) transition was especially well handled from my perspective. There was certainly breakage, but the amount of things you had to fix was relatively small.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.incompatible.php

It was really easy to write code that worked in both 5 and 7. Most of my time was spent waiting for dependencies or frameworks to make the same jump.

Then again, I suppose PHP developers had the hindsight of Python 3 and Perl 6 as a gigantic warning klaxon of what not to do.