How much of the old "A fractal of bad design" post would you say still applies? That one post showcased so many footguns right at the language level that it spooked me away from it forever.
You can get a good sense for what "modern PHP" looks like by browsing through PHP The Right Way (https://phptherightway.com/).
PHP has grown up a lot over the last ten years.
A lot of those are still applies, but these days you can ignore those bad parts and only use the new good parts just like how you would use javascript. Still, I only use php occasionally but I wish it's not as eager in treating string as number in many cases.
if you have an hour to spare, this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCZ5TJCBWMg) is a great talk by Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, on the design of the language, the reason it ended up the way it did, and the ways that it is evolving for the better.