Having worked on projects with includes within includes within includes, and dealing with global variables defined in one file, used in another and reused elsewhere, it's definitely not the best way and it seems to destroy encapsulation.

If you can keep it under control, though, of course it's no different than includes in C/C++ (it probably literally is a wrapper around the macros.) But modern PHP prefers using autoloaders, so you never actually have to use include statements to begin with. You could just as well define those directories and include them through a Composer setting.

> includes within includes . . . global variables

Yeah, that's a pain. You have to exercise a little discipline. Of course none of my code has that ;)

With hand-typed routing, can't you accidentally define two routes that overlap, so some URLs could match both? The only reason it goes to one and not the other is something random like the order the routes are defined in the file? Like if you defined this route:

  /a/b/c

Then you slept, added a bunch of code, came back in three months and put this in:

  /a/*/c

Now you have two routes that match the same URL. And maybe they're separated by several lines of code, so that the mistake is hard to spot.

You can't do that with a filesystem, put two files in the same place.

> The only reason it goes to one and not the other is something random like the order the routes are defined in the file?

To be fair, that's not random, that's pretty explicit. And if you're optimizing for speed, short circuiting at the first match is a good idea.

But if you're using a router, chances are you're passing the segments as arguments to some function or method anyway, so route /a/*/c and /a/b/c should both wind up returning the same content if the second segment in both cases is 'b'.