Sam, there is no financial incentive to writing any topic a particular way. Some people think negative articles are merely "click bait" but that is not why we write them.

Challenging bad trends is why we write them.

You seem to be of the opinion that your perspective is the only right one. I assure you, it's not. Engineers tend to be a rather arrogant sort and we think we know everything. Ironically, it is often the least experienced who seem to be the worst among us at being so opinionated.

PHP's native templating is exceptionally flexible and practical and does not need the addition of any external libraries, templating engines, compiling, etc., to function and organize code well. It is highly maintainable.

I've been writing code since the 1980's; and for some of America's biggest enterprises, like Dell and Disney.

Frankly, perhaps what you lack is the experience and proper training to organize practical, maintainable code? Because that is not an issue with PHP.