Exactly. Composer is key here. Pear just didn't work well as a third party bolt on. As a result monolithic frameworks such as Zend Framework were born, along with Blogs, come CMS come frameworks. And Rails clones. It's still hard to navigate the 3rd party landscape, but integration is so much easier.

My main gripe with Php is editor support. Jumping around a code base is hard when you introduce slightly abstract class loading. The more 'typed' the language is, I guess makes editor help easier, with auto completion etc. But that is a disjoint or me.

Editor support for functions is useful. I'm slightly embarassed still at the frequency of my manual lookups.

Class autoloading is nice, but functions are left by the wayside on the autoloading front, which is a bit gnarly.

The language is actually quite quick to learn, and you can hold a lot in your head. You can do a lot just with arrays and foreachs, without having to reach into convenience functions.

Most of my time is laboured over other frameworks and interoperability, rather than any really worry about Php itself.