Mystery cleared up. Our third-party software services provider made the changes during the process of migrating our site from an old version of Joomla to the latest stable version, along with updating or replacing all the plugins, templates and modules that our site was using. They said the change was made to “work with older versions of PHP”. I politely explained why that was a Bad Idea ™ and that it actually broke the code. Thanks for your time and assistance. I will back out all of their changes.