My days of doing web development in PHP have been over for more than a decade. Yet I still retain/know a lot about PHP enough to pick it up again and do my fixes.
I’ve had to manually patch some plugins because for whatever reason they just keep hardcoding things in the code for small plugins. For big plug-ins I feel like they have passed the trial by error… well, hopefully most of them. I don’t make it my mission to start judging others people plug-ins and patch them and hopefully this is all a one-off.