Oh how I hated the fact that php.ini could change so much of the PHP behaviour... can't say I miss those days.
Also, I don't know about now because I left this ecosystem long ago, but it was very common for apps to bundle their own custom installer scripts (access a webpage, fill a form and so on). Certainly useful for the users but it was never standard and required a lot of work for the developers (and came with their own requirements and bugs).
But I like some of the recent additions to the language. At least the PHP Team keeps up with the competition.
This is changing now. There are no new php.ini changes that would affect how the parser or VM works. The lessons from things like safe_mode and register_globals are learned so well.
There is no shell accessible on these servers, it's on the project to include all dependencies. Composer in this world is strictly not for users, but only for developers. That's a good thing.