I think as a PHP developer I jumped to defending PHP without understanding the nuance you were aiming for, sorry about that. I definitely agree with what you're saying.
No worries, the particular cause-and-effect nuance is subtle enough that a lot of people misunderstand it, which suggests that my phrasing is at fault.
And while the attractive nuisance of PHP's Turing-completeness that encourages those anti-patterns is annoying, it isn't entirely unique:
The platform I cut my development teeth on in 1998 (Zope[1], written in Python) also had a template language that was Turing-complete called DTML[2]. It was a painful transition for the community to deprecate DTML in favor of the new Zope Page Templates (ZPT)[3] that implemented a deliberately less powerful syntax[4][5].
The advantage of a less powerful template syntax is that it forces all "business" application logic (as opposed to "view" logic) out of the templates and into Python code.
Unfortunately, for deployed applications this was a lot of extra work that could only be justified in terms of increased maintainability, which was an even harder "sell" to managers back then.
