PDO Drivers

You could substitute CodeIgniter for PDO in the above and be completely accurate.

Agreed. PDO is simply an abstraction layer. CI's database layer offers a very similar abstraction and was around before PDO came to be, IIRC. I can't speak for why the PDO versions was built, since that does seem redundant to me. And the non-PDO drivers provided by PHP often have some features the PDO ones don't, though they are not the most common ones.

In CI4 we do have support for prepared statements where possible. Note, they are not used by default since the query parameter binding done by our abstraction layer covers most of the same safety benefits a prepared statement can give. I've seen many places where it's recommended to always use prepared statements, even when you're only using the query once, but that doubles the hits on the database leading to decreased performance. Prepared statements can be significantly faster when used correctly, though, so we've added them in.

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