The article is correct in stating that PHP has moved quite a bit in the last ~10 years; even back when I was using PHP in the 5.1/5.2/5.3 days things were already steadily improving.

But ... that doesn't mean that PHP is a good language, or that people hate in PHP "just because it's cool". There are still many issues that remain. For example the very loose typing checking remains an issue and source of real bugs; e.g. a while ago a SAML library could be bypassed because it forgot to add the flag to in_array() to enable strict comparisons.

Much of the problems in PHP are with the standard library, and this is not easy to fix. Even the mysql deprecation (in favour of mysqli/PDO) took ages. I wrote a thing looking at fopen() in PHP a while ago, and I think it's a good example of the problems that remain in PHP: https://www.arp242.net/php-fopen-is-broken.html

There are still many issues with the standard library like this which are clumsy and just plain design errors, and many of them are too fundamental to work around or fix. Has PHP evolved? Sure, and that's great! But that doesn't mean it's now an especially good language. In general, I'd rather have a poor language with a good standard library than a good language with a poor standard library.

Aside: one weird thing about PHP's stdlib is that it's all written in C; I don't know any other comparable language where all of the standard library is written in C. I think this seriously hamper's the evolution of PHP's stdlib to a more modern experience.

There is no easy fix for any of this btw, because a revamping of the stdlib would likely lead to a "Python 3 scenario", so I don't blame the PHP devs for not fixing it (although I do blame them for introducing new flawed parts to the stdlib, like the whole DateTime fiasco), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.