My opinions:
1. CI4 keeps the CodeIgniter philosophy while embracing modern web development practices and versions of PHP. The nature of language development means older versions of software will inherently be less optimized. If you loved CodeIgniter 1-3 because of it’s simplicity and only-use-what-you-need philosophy then CI4 carries that same opportunity still, despite other PHP frameworks being much more developed.
2. I would hear more about what you feel is “magic”. My guess is that probably it is mostly just “new”, and magic and new are both shiny. What I like about all the CodeIgniters are that they don’t do anything until you tell them. The Model comes prepped with common CRUD functions, as do Resource controllers and API traits and other classes made to fill a function, but none of them are mandatory. CI4 is very good about providing interfaces so developers can implement their own layers for whatever they want, and even the bundled classes work through services so you can replace any pieces you want and keep others.
I love CI4, I believe CI3 is legacy software and should be maintained but not used for new projects. CI4 is a huge change in implementation but with a consistent philosophy on development.
