One of the most irritatingly shallow criticism of React has always been "ooh you're mixing html and control in the same file, it's PHP all over again!" The criticism is not particularly interesting or valid, given the differences between the two.
Back when I first learned PHP I recall the horror of seeing buckets of tutorials that involved writing database queries directly in the middle of templating HTML, but the materials appear to have gotten better from a brief glance (with W3schools, as always, teaching worst practices).
It looks like the author's memory of PHP stopped before modern standards were established. Which is to be expected, since they probably left PHP a long time ago to become an evangelist for another language/framework.
Here "PHP" is used as a generic term for "whatever crap we called web programming back in the 00s." Or maybe just "WordPress."
Back when I first learned PHP I recall the horror of seeing buckets of tutorials that involved writing database queries directly in the middle of templating HTML, but the materials appear to have gotten better from a brief glance (with W3schools, as always, teaching worst practices).