I asked about this at a previous meeting... Just thought I'd offer a follow-up.
Many months ago PHP devs had decided to deprecate then remove support for short tags <? like this ?>, forcing everyone to use the long <?php ?>. It was listed in a few "what's new in PHP 8" articles on the net.
Looks like PHP devs had a change of heart after saner minds provided saner thoughts.
The confusion comes from there being 2 RFCs on the matter:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_php_short_tags https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_php_short_tags_v2
The "big guys" in php provided counterarguments: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/counterargument/deprecate_php_short_tags
The first RFC vote passed, the 2nd one failed. I see no third one, and can't find any further mention on the matter, so I'm assuming it's now a dead issue and we'll have <? ?> tags forever more.
To make things more confusing, I'm pretty sure 7.4 did sneak in deprecation according to v1 of the RFC, requiring disabling deprecation notices or changing all short tags. But this change was subsequently backed out. (Can anyone clarify?)
Of course, I won't know for sure how this works in PHP8 until I upgrade to Fedora 33 and its PHP8...