PHP is an awful mess, and the fact that it's a common tool for budding web devs makes that worse, not better. New coders should not have to learn to navigate that pile to get anything done. I feel for them because I've been them.
I think that not wanting to see things from that perspective closes you off from becoming a better programmer.
Approaching others' criticisms with an open mind and trying to disprove them will make you better than trying to hamfist it into a claim of gatekeeping where there is none.
Blindly saying that PHP is a hot mess, in a public setting, is detrimental to I think the community at large. PHP is but one of the many tools I’ve been using, my heart is with Common Lisp, but I’ve really enjoyed Java, golang, C++, Typescript and now rust. Nothing binds me to PHP except I get a tremendous amount of stuff done with it.
I have plenty of hot takes on technology, and love to use strong language when I rant amongst friends. If anything, I am really not attached to any one of them, there is good and bad everywhere, and many decisions have nothing to do with technical merits at all.
So the point is that PHP is no different than say Go or JS or Java. They all have their pros and cons.
My objection is that you're declaring that people who attack a language are actually attacking its users, which makes them bullies, which means you should ignore them. I think you're taking things far too personally and using it as a reason to dismiss criticism.
My takeaway from the article was that when we see someone using a technology we despise, we take action to make their specific life better, rather than hate on the tech. In the case of PHP, that might be asking what issues they run into and suggesting solutions. That could lead to conversations like “you know, Python doesn’t have this issue, you might want to check out X framework to try it out”. But general flaming on PHP isn’t productive.
But really, switching to Java for a bit, a tremendous amount of amazing engineering has gone into making Java the language it is. The Java flaming might have gone down in recent years, but the hot takes from the C/C++ unix crowd in the aughts was impressive.