It's a bit of semantics, sure, but there's a subtle difference. In something like Java, there's a very distinct complication phase, the compilation is successful (type checks pass) and the bytecode is shipped off, and someone else runs that bytecode later. In PHP, you ship the code itself and the compilation phase is essentially the same as runtime. There is no distinct phase where types are pre-checked and analyzed. In PHP, all the syntax and type checking happens during (a phase of) runtime.

That's my understanding as well, so I don't understand why the introduction is worded as it is.