Migrating a live WordPress website to a Local Server: why some elements of the website are missing?

It turns out that the what I thought to be incomplete tags was actually just the short form of the delimiter (as you can notice, I’m not very familiar with PHP and WordPress).

Instead of editing every single file and appending php to every <? tag, the solution could not be easier:

Apache > PHP > PHP Settings > short open tag

Boom.

sigh