> No one is claiming that PHP is and/or was without fault.
I'm emphasizing the "is" part. "No one is claiming that PHP is without fault."
My comment is asserting that there are definitely people who say that PHP is not bad. I did not speak to whether anyone claims PHP was never bad.
By some measure, every language has warts. PHP in 2008 had a ton of them. PHP in 2020 has fewer of them. Which is a lot like JS.
I can find warts in all of them. At one point I'd have put PHP right above JavaScript and ASP down at the bottom. Now? I don't see it. Legacy issues are still there, like inconsistent standard library function names, but otherwise I don't see it - as a whole - as any more 'warty' than most of those.