There is a bunch of relatively new stuff in place that really help: Enums, match, readonly (classes), attributes for metadata, union types in function signatures (very useful), improved destructuring. Also some issues with traits and interfaces have been resolved since a while.

Those kind of changes are good for PHP, because they give you more tools to write compact, simple code that plays nicely with some of the legacy builtins/libraries and so on. It's remarkable how much it has been improving.

However, it's still a clunky language, because almost every feature has its weird caveats and limits that a more modern, well designed language just doesn't have.

Absolutely love Laravel!!