The PHP of today is now a fine house built on a terrible foundation. The warts from the original language are still there, but inexplicably they have decided to just soldier on and build a good language on top of them.

For instance they've built a perfectly good object system with many advanced features; yet arrays, strings, etc aren't objects so you can't even call methods on them, they can only be manipulated by a dated, procedural API.

https://github.com/nikic/scalar_objects

However scalar methods also creates a bigger discussion around the existing standard library, should functions be duplicated? Etc.

Better in my opinion, because the standard library is mostly functions in the global namespace is to add pipe operator, it has been voted on but not passed yet due to some limitation.

Pipe operator is more flexible because you can use your own functions when chaining.

And then of course there are libraries that does this, which is similar to how Java does it, compare float vs Float.