The example in the article is poorly chosen, because an associative array (map) ...

The example in the article is poorly chosen, because an associative array (map) would be more suitable. What you wrote is almost the same with PHP:

    ['abc' => 2, 'def' => 3][$x] ?? 'default';

PHP's `match` is a kind of functional `switch`. For instance, in the following example, an associative array would induce several useless function calls, and `match` is more readable than a sequence of if+returns:

    return match ($key) {
        "id", "ID" => unique_id(),
        "UUID" => generate_uuid(),
        default => findExternalId($key),
    };