[Darth-Apple]

What about PHP9?  There is some discussion that this may cause a major revision bump.

These kinds of similar changes are part of what has caused PHP8 to break so many websites. I'd almost rather PHP make all of these changes at once the way that Python 3 did, which would slow adoption but would prevent the mess of support problems that would come with subsequent releases. 

PHP has badly needed an overhaul for a long time (it's a weird language, an empty string is the same as 0, and an empty string with a single space is also evaluated as being "equal" to the numeric 0. These are the sorts of things that very few other languages would ever tolerate.) But the fairly substantial changes that have come with each PHP release have been a lot to try to keep up with. A substantial amount of older code will need to be refactored a good bit.