But a few things are weird to you but not some objective view of weird. Many of your points I didn't comment on are not unique to PHP at all (such as octal numbers)
> For the most part you've defended PHP's behavior as design decisions or offered workarounds.
You could say that unifying PHP error codes and exceptions is a "workaround" but the language provides specific support for it (The ErrorException class) so it's pretty much a standard pattern. The end developer has the choice of development style.
> PHP doesn't need a module system? What?
I have projects with thousands of files -- as someone else said, Namespaces and Autoloaders covers this.