Is this PHP job aversion irrational? Just curious if anyone else here would also skip over a job posting if it involved PHP development.
PHP the language is great both despite and because of its neat quirks. It is among the easiest to get started with and deploy quickly. But that means the barrier to entry is so low that a lot of PHP deployed out there is garbage.
I would put it like this – maintaining someone else's PHP code can be difficult, but starting a new PHP project from scratch, especially with a modern framework like Laravel, can be really enjoyable.
So, I wouldn't say you should avoid a PHP job on principle, but find out if the code followed the PSR standards, used a recent framework, or something else that can give you some hope for a sane chance at understanding what the previous developer did.
And yes, you can screw up even using the standards or the frameworks, but you have to try harder and actively work against best practices in those cases.
Composer, PHPStan and/or Psalm, and modern frameworks like Symfony?