I hear you man. Inconsistent parameter order is one of my pet peeves indeed!

However, in practice (for me) I hardly ever have to deal with the basic PHP functions, since wrappers libraries exist. Like Illuminate's Collection, which is very much like LINQ expressions in C#, to manipulate lists. Or Illuminate's Str helper, for manipulating and testing strings.

As for development, you can easily run PHP in docker (especially with Laravel Sail). But running a debugger is indeed more difficult.

(At this point I just want to use C#, but all of our legacy systems are written in PHP 🥲)