Commenting out PHP code all of a sudden behaves differently [closed]

I have this function in Laravel

public function handle()
    {
       // Run Athena query and fetch CSV file
       $start = time();

       $csv = AthenaService::runQueryCSV('SELECT
       date,
       datetime
       FROM
       (
        SELECT
            cl.date,
            /*CASE
                WHEN cl.list_id = 4000001
                AND cl.date_inserted != ''
                /*OR cl.list_id = 4000001
                AND cl.date_inserted IS NOT NULL
                THEN SUBSTR(cl.date_inserted, 2, 16)
                ELSE SUBSTR(cl.entry_date, 2, 16)
            END AS datetime,*/
            cl.datetime,
            mc.weekend_flag,

On line 16 I committed a typo, the /* before the OR and when I look at the output on VSCode the rest of the code in the script is also commented out. But when I run the script it still works. My questions
a. I committed this error way back in 2021 and only recently noticed that all the code following this in line 16 is commented out. Did something change after the 3rd of Feb 2021 in terms of how VScode deals with commenting out code?
b. Why does the query in the script still complete even though most of it shows as commented out in VScode? Well it looks like it completes and I even executed the query in AWS Athena and it only shows lines 13 to 20 commented out and it completes