I hate this shit being routinely used in PHP. Symfony uses those functional comments for routing, essentially scanning every controller file as text on every visit, to gather the url patterns above functions. Laravel uses Reflection, which is functionally the same thing, to provide arguments to controller functions. Also, kind of related, the project I’m working now has few functions that use backtrace to return different results based on where they are called from. It is indeed very cursed and I’m ripping out any usages of them whenever I see one.
People can get used to weirdest stuff. Like my former coworker who uses mouse upside down, like, fingertip grip on the buttons and cord under palm. Said he used to love playing aerial combat simulators, but couldn’t get used to inverted controls, so he just flipped the mouse and learned to use it inverted for everything else. Havent played videogames in decades but it’s still stuck to him. The only problem is that he was a CEO at tech company, but from a passerby perspective it always looked like it’s his first time using a PC.