The lessons learned before we upgraded to PHP 8.2 was that the way we used to handle PHP installations on free hosting servers was too custom, too fragile, and too painful to update.
So, when updating to PHP 8.2, the decision was made to completely redesign how we install and manage PHP on free hosting. And also to rebuild all servers with the latest OS versions to simplify things.
Those bugs and issues are all resolved now, and we have a nice, clean, simple and maintainable PHP installation. So any upgrades from now on should be much easier.
The main reason it was so painful was because the PHP upgrade was much more than just bumping the version of PHP.
I described this in more detail here too: