> But php got shamed for it so badly they got into an identity crisis, for the last decade it’s slowly been trying to become Java and do everything correct.
PHP was a dumpster fire. It's not "pragmatic" to have trivial SQL injections everywhere that are difficult for non-experts to fix. It isn't "pragmatic" to have user hostile error messages. It isn't "pragmatic" for different parts of your standard library to disagree about core design principles. It's a hundred different recipes from around the globe just thrown into a blender for a few seconds in the hope the result will be "fusion cuisine" when it's barely even food.
I wrote a whole bunch of PHP ~15 years ago for money, and before that I wrote some for the comedy site friends and I ran in the 1990s, I also had the misfortune of picking up a card in my scrum the other month where I had to modify some PHP. It's changed. It hasn't changed anywhere near enough to justify itself.
I would rate PHP3 era PHP as a 0/10 maybe just use static HTML instead, and modern PHP is maybe 3/10 where it's better but it's just not better enough to use if you could pick something else.