I'm not sure what I actually did and how to reproduce this issue again, but now it works well. I took previous version of PHPstorm. When I installed new one, the previous one was simply renamed to sth like 'phpstorm2'.
Here are my thoughts what actually happened:
As I understand for highlighting is responsible that part of application which is managed under Languages & Frameworks / PHP / PHP Runtime.
To reproduce this issue you may try to disable there "Core / Core" and try to write down in any place of your phpfile following:
\Exception::class();
And in your case this class will not be highlighted, as it presents in Core_c.php. In my case it is placed in
/opt/phpstorm/plugins/php/lib/php.jar!/stubs/Core/Core_c.php

I'm 100% sure that these libs were always enabled, but why I didn't saw this - that is the question.
So if I face this issue again my steps would be:
- Try to verify
Languages & Frameworks / PHP / PHP Runtime. The better way would be to enable ALL libs.
- Check External Libraries in the project tree. Check read privileges for
/opt/phpstorm/plugins/php/lib/php.jar and probably reinstall this plugin.
- Try to find out function which I don't actually see in External Libraries.
File | Settings | Editor | File Types, can you make sure that the*.phpextension is present in thePHPsection?