php isn't bad. just got a bad rep. many langs got quirks. some more than others. but php has more web production success story and usage than most.
A significant cause of it’s bad rap is touched on briefly in this article, Wordpress.
Even back in 5.3 days, you could write elegant and scaleable code, it just took work to do. At a former employer using PHP 5.3 on 2005 era hardware, we could do 500+ req/sec per machine with an average response time under 100ms and a P99 response time of under 250ms, with a zero downtime SLA and hundreds of millions of requests per day. Yeah, it wasn’t easy, but it worked.
As a dear friend used to say, PHP is a ball of nails. You throw it and it sticks. Just exercise care when picking it up and all is well.
Appeal to authority isn't a valid strategy.
Facebook used PHP because they wanted to build something really quickly and afterwards it became too costly to switch, as it always does, so they built an entire engineering department to work around PHP issues.
Your average PHP dev team can't do that.
Plus, what are you comparing it to? Reasonable people don't compare it to Vlang, they compare it to Python, Ruby, Java, C#/.NET, Javascript/Typescript, Golang, and PHP ranks at best averagely against those regarding language, standard library and ecosystem consistency.