I'd like to discuss this before perhaps reporting it as a bug.
For example, on a fully updated CentOS 7 system:
# php -v
PHP 5.4.16 (cli) (built: Oct 30 2018 19:30:51)
# rpm -q php
php-5.4.16-46.el7.x86_64
Note above, this is not a vanilla PHP 5.4.16, this is Red Hat's 5.4.16-46.el7 (rebuilt...