At first this was a feature I was excited for. After using it, I've changed my mind about it. Constructor property promotion was added so that you could pass an argument to a class constructor, and it would get auto assigned to a property, without you having to do $this->That = $That in your constructors over and over.
The main point of attributes is to add metadata to code that is easily parseable and can think for itself when you ask for it. Up to now most devs were probably doing this using the PHP docblock thing - those double star multi-line comments. We'd fill them with @tags and then parse that data with Reflection and probably some regular expressions to make any sense of the blob of text.
For a long time now, and like pretty much every other PHP dev out there, at some point I invented my own Object wrapper around arrays to give them nice OOP interfaces. I am a low level person so implementing my own wrappers is far more entertaining to me than just using one of the 34859 that already exist.
You've built a fancy new photo uploader into your app and in less than 10 minutes after rolling it to production someone uploads a bunch of photos and they are sideways, upside down, or even worse... backwards. Welcome to the internet where phones are able to upload directly from their photo gallery. It's fine, we can fix this.
It may not be believable considering how often even to this day
plain-text passwords get leaked, but the history of the password hash is
a long one. Way back when I was just starting web dev 22 some years
ago, the common practice was when a user creates an account you hash
their password and store that value. Then every time they log in you
take what they give you, hash it, see if the hash matched what you
stored.
Pegasus Gate