Lots of answers on using the type support that is there, but some use of forced casting is also common, as is using === when appropriate, avoiding "if ($bool)" in favor of "if ($bool === true)" for boolean comparisons, using linters, static analyzers, and so on.
It’s always appropriate. A good IDE should highlight == as a warning.
My code quality and programming abilities got significantly better since forcing strict types and comparisons on myself. I can’t imagine writing PHP any other way now.
There are a few instances where using == is desirable, for instance it allows you to compare two instances of an object and returns true if the properties are the same.
In this case === will always return false since it checks if the two instances are the same object.
