Well - Superficially jhennike may have some points although it seems to reflect frustration rather than that's the way things are - As someone who first got my hands on in Mini days Vax 11/750 - Prime mini then moved on to micros - then Lisa/Mac's and onto PC's with DOS then Windows - NO software or indeed hardware stands still for long.
I came to Codeigniter looking for a framework to satisfy specific needs without bloat for a Town History archive that had been poorly written with PHP 5.xx - 100+ pages of Spaghetti OOp's that crashed when the hosting moved on to PHP 7.xxx The original developer just walked away leaving us high & dry - Looked at Laravel - Symfony - CakePHP - Zend and CI - decided CI would satisfy requirements - Lightweight Framework, cleaner code, reasonable support available and if properly written able to be passed on to other programmers for updates as time goes by.
Schertt has a valid point, hanging on to outdated and unsupported versions of PHP is problematic
I personally like .env as its specific to CI4 and easy to manage settings.
Dave Hollingworth's - Codeigniter 4:Build a Complete Web Application from Scratch on UDEMY.COM - a thorough and comprehensive course on CodeIgniter4 is worth a look - Quick to reply to questions if you've signed up.
