WordPress has never aimed to be bleeding edge. Many hosts that target the low-end market typically have older PHP installations anyway. Not ideal, but that’s often the way cheap hosting rolls.
Such a mess…
Not sure what this comment or the (in my opinion, badly) chosen editorialized post title here is referring to.
As far as I can see from a quick scan there’s nothing unexpected here. WordPress itself aims to be compatible with PHP 8 in the upcoming release but obviously cannot guarantee anything about third party themes and plugins.
They’re recommending theme and plugin authors maintain compatibility with PHP 7 at least for a while. Given where and how WordPress is usually used (ie. often by non-technical users on shared hosting or other environments that may not be frequently upgraded), this is sensible.
Named parameters was a known issue and raised during discussion of the RFC on internals. It’s up to each individual project as to how they deal with it. For something the size of WordPress it’s completely expected to me that they’re saying “don’t rely on parameter names not changing for now”
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