The hatred against PHP seems to be coming from the people that only know the old days of the language and haven't checked it recently. I'd say PHP is quite relevant for any kind of web-apps these days; the language has evolved greatly in many fields, you have a huge community and there are tons of libraries to get anything done. Especially with Laravel, you can get a fully-functioning web application with a full auth flow in a few minutes.

There are places where you might want to think twice about using PHP; especially with cloud-native stuff, I see that there are many libraries that do not really consider supporting PHP, which might make it troublesome sometimes depending on the environment you will use it. However, if there is a need to develop a web app as quickly as possible, I have personally never seen anything beat PHP.