Sometimes "==" is used under the hood ( switch/case i think?) and it's hard to avoid it completely even if you always use "===" in the code

You don't need to use switches. In fact, I'd argue that if blocks are better if you're evaluating against variable data types. Alternatively, if you really, really want to use a switch statement and loose typing might cause issues, it's pretty easy to compare types before the switch statement, e.g,

    if(gettype($a) !== "...") { return false; }
    switch($a) { ... }

Either choice doesn't really look like the sane language anymore

When you have dynamically typed languages, whether to coerce or not is a design decision with usability trade-offs. Javascript exhibits pretty similar behavior with switch statements for exactly the same reason: it also has two types of equality comparisons.

Also, PHP allows you to add explicit type casting to case statements. e.g.,

    case (string) 1:

And what is the equivalent of "===" for ">" and "<"?