PHP 8 introduced too many breaking changes. Many of them making the language worse.
At our company, we ported all public facing projects to PHP 8 over the last 4 months. A pain in the ass.
All internal projects will stay on PHP 7, running in Docker containers, and will be ported to Python in the coming months.
Python is hopefully less likely to come with breaking changes in the future.
It broke adding properties dynamicly to objects.
It broke easy string handling for many functions where null was rendered as an empty string. This is especially annoying as you often get null values from the database. It makes sense to have a null value for "Don't know the color of the car" in the DB. And it makes sense to render it as "Color: " in the user interface. The easy string conversion always was one of the strengths of PHP.
It feels like Java all over again.
It's a lesson they're supposed to have learned going from 2 to 3.