You can do that or something similarly bad in pretty much any language if you have write access to where the files are. That's really a server misconfiguration problem, not php problem.
Huge misfortune of php is that because of the timing and huge popularity in relatively early days of web it got to be permanently associated with amateurs doing stupid shit. I was part of that early era, so trust me that php4 as bad as it was, was still fantastic compared to writing CGI scripts in C, or running mod_perl that you had to restart every time you edit some file.
Nothing like typing in an ssh prompt and each time you press a button on the keyboard you have to wait a few seconds for the char to appear on the screen, because it has to go to the server and back first... that't the true "blind typing" :)))
the obvious downside is that it's a lot of work and takes a lot more time... so it might be "the right way™" for some cases, but it's definitely not a rule of thumb...
Not necessarily, often times, especially in big corporations programmers will be incentivized to deliver things quickly, rather than to provide the optimal solution. Not because they are bad at programming, but because they have quotas and deadlines to meet. Just remember that story of how in the first Excel version a dev had hard-coded some of the cell dimension calculations as they were under pressure to close as much tasks as fast as possible.
So, what's your argument exactly? In every language there's a number of back-end devs who simply don't like using javascript, they want to do everything in a single language, and this is the tool for them. And that's great. I'm just saying that I don't think there's a significant number of them, that's all. Most of young people seem to be enjoying the modern javascript nowadays, and I see zero benefit for them in any of those tools. And the popularity of the tools like LiweWire kinda shows it, as I've heard a lot of Laravel people talking about it, but I personally don't know a single one who actually switched to using it for work in the end... maybe it takes more time, we'll see...
There's a plenty of people using RoR, but feeling equally productive in JS, and they'll benefit significantly less than backend developers who were forced into using it, but never really liked it.
Laravel's crew had a very similar idea with Livewire (even the name sound similar, probably not intentionally) and it also created a lot of buzz back when it was released - but I don't think it really got past "let's play with it a bit" step for most of teams. We'll see how well this one does...
It's a productivity hack for companies that have more backend devs that strongly prefer ruby to javascript, like a presume basecamp team is... AFAIK this doesn't apply to the average web dev teams nowadays, most of whom never even used ruby before...
Browsing randomly through the content I've noticed that you're discussing impedance, capacitive/inductive loads and transitional states in the DC section (and also fairly early in it). I think it'd be way easier to grasp for someone new to this if it was a section on its own, and after the AC circuits are already well explained. To tackle this properly mathematically and understand it well you need to understand a lot of very abstract things like impedance, phase shifts and complex numbers very well, and IMHO that's much easier to explain on a stable state AC circuits, and then apply that knowledge on the on/off transitions too.
In my time this was basically a distinction between an engineer and a technician - technicians generally having a lot more practical experience, but lacking in the theory, while fresh out of Uni engineers knowing the theory well, but lacking practical skills in solving the real-world problems. With time a good engineer picks up those skills too.
There's also a cultural problem with US having this superficial politeness that is expected in communication, where orders are given in the form of "would you please", but are still expected to be followed without a word. I'm not autistic (well AFAIK), so if a manager asks me if I'd take a task and I'm super busy, I'd probably (try to) refuse it too, but I'd do it in a polite, beat around the bush manner, and manager would recognize the situation, and (again super politely) try to push back and we'd come to some agreement. No one would freak out. Problem with Asperger is that they're not very good in this back and forth social dance. In other countries, say in Eastern/South Europe culture of communication is different and manager would simply tell that guy to do the task, with no "would you please", no smiling, just a simple "do that". Not because of being rude, but because there's simply less social rituals in the communication. My (anecdotal) impression is that this "less-polite" environment, while it freaks out many Americans ("people are so direct and rude here!"), is much more friendlier to people with Asperger. I've worked with a few and they were doing just fine, super intelligent, super focused, great fit for IT companies. You just can't expect them to read your mind.