After years of working with PHP, my take away was similar to C++: There's a great language in there, somewhere. Limit yourself to a subset of the language which is sane, follow all of the PSR standards, and the result is quite nice.

After all of that, you look at your coworkers' code and realize they either (1) picked a different subset than you did, or (2) PHP is their first language and they have no idea what they're doing.

I mostly stay away from web development now, but if I were to do a new web project, I might still choose PHP if I knew I'd be working with a small, experienced team. It's a highly productive language.