It's 2023 and there is jinja, liquid, moustache and then some. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing truly cross language.
I think that if the dice fell just slightly different, PHP could have taken that niche. Be the best templating language that has bindings to all major languages.
It was really good at arrays, but then piled objects, hashmaps and more on top of these arrays. It had very good and broad string manipulation std functions. But the it piled SQL on top of that.
Imagine if instead of mysql_real_escape it had focused on (nested) caching. Or if instead of the umpteenth mediocre OOP class inheritance it introduced template partials as objects to be defined. If, instead of clumsy form handling, it had the world's fasted serialization (to xml, html, JSON etc). Instead of csv parsers, it offered the best stdlib for rendering data. And so on.
There is a very simple and productive subset of PHP that I feel got neglected over the last 1-2 decades.
The simple, but relatively fast “array”, which has value semantics.
The batteries included networking (HTTP, SMTP etc.) and SQL stuff.
The stateless execution model and straightforward way to combine and execute scripts.
And finally the in-built, seamless HTML templating.
It’s unfortunate that especially the last one got neglected so developers feel the need to build a safe abstraction over it.