I mean, you can do MVC in PHP if you want. I used perl long before I used PHP so the $annotation never bothered me.
I personally like mixing frontend and backend. I get why it's anathema to some, but there are simply tons of use cases where I think the simplicity it offers - being able to capture an entire page of functionality in a single file - outweighs the disadvantages because of the simplicity it offers.
For larger scale applications it's easy to make terrible mistakes leading to spaghetti code - I feel your pain about major crimes and have witnessed a few (and been responsible for some) myself. But this is possible in many languages if you're not using a framework, and modern PHP gives you way more tools to avoid it, even before you look at frameworks, which almost completely obviate the problem.
I personally like mixing frontend and backend. I get why it's anathema to some, but there are simply tons of use cases where I think the simplicity it offers - being able to capture an entire page of functionality in a single file - outweighs the disadvantages because of the simplicity it offers.
For larger scale applications it's easy to make terrible mistakes leading to spaghetti code - I feel your pain about major crimes and have witnessed a few (and been responsible for some) myself. But this is possible in many languages if you're not using a framework, and modern PHP gives you way more tools to avoid it, even before you look at frameworks, which almost completely obviate the problem.