Part of the problem is that once you start using closures and lambdas all over the place, it's really hard to go back to a language without them. Yes, some tools weren't meant to do some jobs, but PHP's competition has those features, and they work, and they work well. If they wanted to make a simple language without those features, fine, but that won't stop people from complaining that it doesn't have them, and it won't stop people from complaining when those features don't work the way that everyone else's versions of the features work.