I do get why JS appeals to people, but switching from PHP to JS feels a little winning an internet argument — you might feel smarter for doing so but in reality all you’ve done is sunk time into something that doesn’t make you any better off.
For PHP on the other hand - even when I started writing PHP3 - so certainly not the very beginnings, it's clearly just cobbling together whatever works from unrelated half-understood parts and so there's no coherent centre to it, when I last worked on some PHP earlier this year it still felt like bailing wire and string.
Equally, PHP3 is worlds apart from modern PHP.
Your point is a little like saying “motorbikes are easy to maintain because they’re based on the penny-farthing”. Times have changed and your references are literally decades out-of-date.
The initial equality operator was a mistake, but that was rectified over a decade ago with `===`. Not having a proper int type sucks and holds the language back in a number of ways, but otherwise the language is wonderfully regular.
And anyone who complains about the ecosystem has obviously never tried python, which after a decade of attempts, is now almost on par with JS of a decade ago!
Saying “at least x isn’t as bad as y” doesn’t further a discussion, it only acknowledges denial about just how bad the problems are with x.
This is particularly true when we weren’t even discussing y (in our case, Python) in the first place.