I personally think it looks broken and wrong. For short strings I don't see the point and for multiline strings, use a heredoc.

The reason I never use Heredoc is because you need to abandon your indentation, otherwise your tabs/spaces get included in the string. Is there a way around that?

Not since PHP 7.3![1] If you indent the closing identifier, then the corresponding indentation will be removed from the content of the heredoc string.

[1]: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php#lang...

I thought they fixed this with [1] Flexible Heredoc in 2017 with PHP 7.3

[1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/flexible_heredoc_nowdoc_syntaxes

I've gotten into the habit of generally using single quoted strings (with 'around them') which alleviates most problems with escaping double quotes. And for the odd string that needs to have a single quote inside I switch back to double quoting.

This approach also has the added bonus of stopping PHP from accidentally evaluating something inside the strings.