..and when you try to extend this to something reasonably complex, including third party libraries and a database, you'll realize why people stopped writing PHP like this years ago.

The actually looks like a simple single controller action using a view model. Nothing really stops you from implementing other abstractions like ORMs, state machine, authentication, web service calls, etc.

I actually think you could build a relatively well organized large project with not much more than this really needed.

You could, but I suspect that inevitably you would wind up having written a framework to organize and manage that complexity, just an ad-hoc and poorly designed one.

True enough, building crappy over engineered frameworks in big projects is inevitable ;-)

If this is not a joke, op is really a victim of framework formatting of his brain. That render() function rendering <?=> tags is just.. I don't know.

It's been a while but isn't <? and <?= standard PHP?

Actually it's <?php but it's the same

<? and <?= and "short open tags" supported optionally on older version but I think enabled by default these days.

Indeed