If this is the quality of the argument then I have nothing to concern myself with.

Your post might be [slightly] humorous, but as an argument against PHP language constructs it fails miserably.

It really doesn't. Especially when you see people pulling out the double claw hammers at your company.

Features that have limited real benefits with lots of risk get abused all the time. They are the retarded tools of the world creating technical debt for everybody else and they should be retired.

Extract is one of the stupidist language feature conceived precisely because it puts something so ripe for abuse into the hands of idiots. It even has a simple name that practically encourages its abuse.

Yup, then you see people building sine wave roads for the square wheels they build last week.

Or making critical parts of infrastructure work by a cron job that calls wget.

For some reason PHP needs extract, because a dictionary just won't do.

  foo["var_x"]

  // for some reason needs to be:

  $var_x

I think you mean catenaries, not sine waves.