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Yes, you can remove that file. It's an inert backup file.

Do remember that uninstalling Admin Tools does not modify your .htaccess file. You may want to replace its contents with the contents of the htaccess.txt file provided with Joomla.

> do you mean I should copy whatever inside the htaccess.txt and paste it on top of .htaccess ? Thanks

Copy whatever is inside of htaccess.txt.

Remove the contents of the .htaccess file (make it a blank file).

Paste the contents of the htaccess.txt file on top of the now empty .htaccess file.

The current PHP version shown in this message is what PHP itself reports, through the PHP_VERSION constant. The value of this constant is set when your host, or the provider of the Linux distribution they use, compiled PHP from its C sources. Therefore, this message cannot be wrong. Ever.

You can verify that it's correct by going to Joomla's PHP Information page and see for yourself that the PHP version is indeed 7.3.

Remember you asked me how to reset your .htaccess, I told you how to do it, and you did it. However, do you remember how your host tells the web server which PHP version to use to load your site? Yup, by adding a server-specific AddHandler line to your .htaccess file. Since you replaced the .htaccess file's contents this line was removed. Therefore the web server reverts to the default PHP version set up by your host which appears to be PHP 7.3.33. Therefore, you need to go back to your hosting control panel and select once again the PHP version you want to apply to your site. If unsure what this means, ask your host.

To understand better how this works, edit your .htaccess file again after you do that. You will very likely see something like this (the following example is from the server hosting my personal blog):

# php -- BEGIN cPanel-generated handler, do not edit
# Set the “ea-php81” package as the default “PHP” programming language.
<IfModule mime_module>
  AddHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php81 .php .php8 .phtml
</IfModule>
# php -- END cPanel-generated handler, do not edit

The first two and the last line is a comment. The <IfModule> lines are just a guard expression which prevents the web server from spitting out an error if it's misconfigured in a way that it cannot apply a custom PHP version. All of these lines are not actually necessary.

The line that does the trick on this particular server is the AddHandler line which tells it to handle .php files with the application/x-httpd-ea-php81 handler. On this particular server the aforementioned handler is set up system-wide to use PHP 8.1.14. Don't try to copy that line on your server; there's a very good chance that your server is set up differently.

You're welcome!