Maybe "minimal" was not the right word. I hope the context made clear that I meant the type system was lacking even for basic uses. Here are 3 common cases.

Some PHP functions (e.g. opening a file) return a `resource` type, but PHP has no official way to declare it. So the right way is to declare `mixed` as an official type (which means `any`) and fix that declaration with a phpdoc comment.

Phpdoc provides generics (named "templates", à la C++), e.g. `iterable<Something>` where `iterable` is an official PHP type (which is awfully imprecise without phpdoc).

Phpdoc has tuples and (associative) array shapes, e.g. `@return list{int, \Error}`.

In past PHP versions, the type system was worse because the internal types were ambiguous: types were implicitly nullable, i.e. `string` meant `null|string`. When PHP gradually added sum types, they fixed that ambiguity.

it has union and intersection types, but it is nothing like typescript.

> PHP type system is lacking but I wouldn't call it minimal.

PHP still doesn't have generics, right? IMO any type system without higher-order types is definitely on the minimal side.

That's exactly it but PHP Core refuses to address the typed array issue in wait for a consensus on Generics even though those two things serve different audiences.

I haven't actually run into a single issue with PHP's type system in the last few years. Literally the only thing that remains is typed arrays but that seems to be ways off due to fragmentation in how the core devs want it handled.