As an admin of PHP apps at that time I can sincerely say screw you, you're lying. PHP apps breaking because new version of PHP shat on compatibility was pretty common, and weirdly enough got more common in newer versions.
You also had to keep unholy combo of php extensions (why that garbage is in app server and not app) and server config because the special little retard that designed the app decided he must do something different.
And forget about ever leaving apache, if it doesn't use some apache module to fix PHP/developer ineptitude it will at least have half of the request routing logic in .htaccess file.
Haha yeah I can say, with the same sincerity, that I get occasional calls about fixing PHP apps that I built 2007-2013. They've been running (without upgrades) on some forgotten server in a multinational corporation.
I tell them that they should let their compliance department know, that the version of PHP isn't even supported, and I list some of the thousand security fixes that they aren't using.
I usually end up VPN/FTP:ing into a forgotten era to add the fixes and I definitely don't want to go back.
I had this happen about a year and a half ago with an application I wrote in 2009. Finally got them to allow me to rewrite everything in C#, allowing me to keep up to date on security vulnerabilities and performance improvements, without having to do much but run through a series of tests when a NuGet package or .NET version upgrade is released. NuGet with current .NET is a far different beast now, than when you used .NET Framework and plenty of XML assembly binding.
You also had to keep unholy combo of php extensions (why that garbage is in app server and not app) and server config because the special little retard that designed the app decided he must do something different.
And forget about ever leaving apache, if it doesn't use some apache module to fix PHP/developer ineptitude it will at least have half of the request routing logic in .htaccess file.