I'm often amused by developers that revile PHP, while going on to use another language, which suffers from a similar set of problems to PHP, oftentimes with poorer performance and more complex toolchains.
PHP deserves a little more love, imo.
But truth be told, the hate is deserved. It never was a particularly efficient language, which might not matter that much, but it was riddled with gotchas, warts and horrible solutions to many technical and social problems.
Today PHP is faster than many alternatives, many of its warts got fixed, but I cannot brush off the fact that it's still based on a poorly-designed base and runtime library.
I'm still using PHP when it makes sense, in the same way I'm still using perl where it makes sense.
I'm happy that the language is evolving and there is a strong ecosystem with quality libraries and developers unlike what it used to be 5 years ago.
I've been doing several languages (Scala, and Typescript. also Go recently) in last few years. But, I still follow PHP ecosystem closely and I'd definitely choose it for my next web startup. It's just 10x faster and ultimately cheaper to build web with PHP. That's why there are so many big success stories that started with PHP even in areas that you wouldn't believe. Surprisingly enough, not only web! One of Cloudflare's founders said on an interview that their back-end was written in PHP and it was used for a long time. That's one of the things that you think no one would do.
JS ecosystem still lacks good reliable vendors and that holds some companies away from it. Surprisingly it's holding up really well even though must of the packages are maintained by individual contributors.