It's now a powerful, fast, flexible platform with a load of amazing libraries and tools -- graphql, webhooks, databases, all sorts. There's an amazing level of recent PHP support out there you can host on.
And then there are the terrible applications, written from inadequate specs, in a hurry, by people who just aren't developers. And they are embedded, and people want them fixed.
You have to have a knack for, and some enjoyment from, that work.
The worst I have encountered is a Wordpress site built by some people who did not know Wordpress could do several important things, so they'd subverted the loop, ignored where they could hook, and embedded wordpress outside the loop to do stuff, which was a nightmare.
The second worst was, it must be said, a Laravel app, but that problem wasn't the PHP so much (though it had been written in a hurry with an awful lot of duplication that we could have refactored out), it was the unreliable assumptions made about MySQL default result ordering.
Which is actually the secondary problem here: people who make bad PHP decisions usually make bad SQL, email and HTTP decisions too.
If building your own thing from scratch, or starting a new project, etc., PHP is a blast now, actually. But the very old things... not so much.
Of course that was never guaranteed and subsequent optimizations and changes have really removed that ability to ignore order in many situations. Plus, MySQL also changed to actually check if you're doing GROUP BY properly by default.
MySQL was always a big part of the PHP story so it's fitting they've followed similar arcs of improvement and growing pains over the years.
at some point in the past PHP was the most productive tool for some quick & dirty coding, but not anymore for me.
I’m a contributor over there.
Wordpress is kind of it's own ecosystem. I have been a PHP dev for years and never touched any Wordpress code.
Most jobs recruit for specific frameworks like symfony or laravel.