John's moodle page

So here's my latest nightmare on Moodle. 1. It requires multiple upgrade steps to upgrade ONE instance. 2. My end-users have never  upgraded and are still on 3.8.4. I have about 30 instances, or thereabouts. 3. I was forced to  upgrade my server OS which upgraded PHP to version 8. 4. This broke Moodle 3.8.4 because apparently it is unacceptable to not have a questionmark before declaring a nullable return variable?!?! I mean really. This: (or something like it) is apparently NO! BAD!      myfunction(type varname = null) apparently we have to now      myfunction(?type varname = null) OK. right. Because who cares. Anyway point is there are about 10 000 of these in Moodle. Plus it also doesn't like the [\#Something] syntax. You have to delete about 2000 of those and pray it works. The alternative, in my case, is manually upgrade each instance, like 3.8.4 -> 3.8.5, 3.8.5->3.8.6 that kind of thing, all the way to 4.0.3. Because the databases diff...