PHP 7.2 introduced significant advancements over older versions like PHP 5.6. These changes made decoding much more complex.

: The ionCube Loader is a PHP extension that decodes this bytecode at runtime and executes it directly via the PHP virtual machine.

She documented everything in a war-room post: "Root cause: missing ionCube loader for PHP 7.2. Resolution: runtime opcode extraction and reconstruction. Permanent fix: schedule rewrite of Artemis for PHP 8.2 by Q3."