You're conflating application state with request state. Updating application state based on a request is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but it necessarily invites the possibility of a memory (or database, file, etc) leak. Either PHP can't update application state at all or it can and necessarily suffers from the same potential to leak memory (I suspect the latter, since an application without side-effects would be worthless).
With Django processing model any array can become the source of a memory leak. I have heard that Ruby and NodeJS developers often have to restart their applications every several hours because they even have no tools to find the source of a leak. The problem that does not exist in PHP by design.