I'm with you on being kind in code reviews but one of the canonical examples of sticky bad PHP code is the addslashes top answer on SO for preventing SQL injection. It stayed there for years/decades and hundreds if not thousands of junior devs copied and pasted it.
So there's some risk when we share code that Google can index and possibly elevate.
I think consulting an algorithms book first would give a more formal example that you could work from.
The purpose is to illustrate what we are doing and setting the stage for later implementations. The overhead is practically unmeasurable unless we are filling the object table with these things (we are not).
Property lookup and function calls are pretty darn fast in PHP, especially with JIT enabled.
I think that's typically how one would measure complexity and regardless of JIT I think it introduces some artificial cost.
Well, I’m doing this for fun, mostly in an illustrative manner. I’m not getting paid for this, nor is anyone reviewing my work. So thanks for volunteering, though your critical analysis could be more constructive.
As to the typos, I suspect it comes from the WordPress editor just being its weird self and perhaps me starting to type in the wrong place, or Grammarly updating the wrong thing. Who knows, but it’s not in the markdown version of this draft.