Parse error wp-settings line 600+ // Web host update PHP 5.6 to 7.3

I am hoping somebody can point me in the right direction.

I wholly admit that I have not kept up with WordPress in recent history, I was versed in WP in the earlier days, coming from a different platform, but life changes, and I have not kept up. Afaik, things were working fine, the 3 sites / blogs were dormant but still live online over the holidays. I designed them back in the day with a simple custom theme. Nothing crazy or elaborate. From the ground up. Standard code. Maintained it for a while, but probably have not touched the admin panel for over 5 years. Mostly for fear of breaking something.

I was just notified today that sites were down. All of them with the same parse error towards the end of wp-settings, line 600+. So, not my code or anything I did, or a plug-in. Other than not updating wordpress 🙁

All three error like this:

Blank page with:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘new’ (T_NEW) in /nfs/c01/h01/mnt/32648/domains/mydomainname.com/html/blog/wp-settings.php on line 646

I suspected a web host / server change. And the web host (media temple) confirmed a mandatory change they instituted from PHP 5.6 to 7.3. No way back. I would need to pay $$$ to upgrade to some advanced package, that then lets me install the php of my choice. Not something I look forward to maintaining or spend money one. I just want to get things live again, for now.

Things is: I’m locked out of WordPress altogether.
I cannot update that way. I don’t think I can archive. Export. Re-import into a newer install (if that is an option, I thought it was)

All I have left is what is on the server directory as files, and however that ties into the database file(s).

I’m thinking the line about T_NEW may be a red herring, that there’s something more at play, I don’t know what to change it to, or if I should touch even tough that.

> is there a some kind of summary that explains this error and how to fix it, when one has not kept up with PHP & WP changes?

> is there a way to force an update, when you can’t do it automatically?

> is there a way to export/import without the control panel … along the lines of grabbing all data & text, but putting it into a fresh wordpress install, then editing the css from scratch

Thank you for reading and hopefully giving me a pointer in the right direction as to how to resolve this.

I had found a topic that was very similar, but it was locked down, and I couldn’t ask a how do I do step x that a person mentioned.