For PHP 5.3 code to work on PHP 8+ you'd have had to completely forego error catching because that was completely upended in 7.0 or 7.2 (I forget which), not used short open tags, never used the class name as a constructor (that happened a lot in PHP 5), have no mcrypt functions, not used __autoload(), have had the foresight to use PDO instead of mysql_ (was PDO available in 5.3? I'd never seen it that early I think), you'd have had to be fortunate enough to not used ereg_, I think that older versions used # in ini file comments (I remember that breaking at some point, don't remember when), never used each(), not used safe_mode for mysql (strange because that was the default I think), and probably a million other issues that I hadn't encountered. If you have codebase written for PHP 5.3 that still works on modern PHP, I'd love to see it. I honestly don't believe such a codebase exists beyond the most trivial.