Originally Posted by redwhiteandblue

You're talking about short open tags - <? ... ?> which are possibly being deprecated.

The short echo tags <?= ... ?> are not dependent on an ini setting https://www.php.net/manual/en/langua...ax.phptags.php and there's no proposal to deprecate them.
They are actually line 1 of the PSR-1 coding standard https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-1/

Not that anyone actually follows that...