Oranges are a citrus fruit.
Does my argument strike you as being somewhat flawed? Making a true but irrelevant statement is not an argument. PHP is worse than other languages, not equal to them. You create more debt, and it is harder to fix. That is why experienced developers spend the time explaining to beginners that PHP is bad, rather than just ignoring PHP as the original poster wondered.
But what makes it "bad"? Everyone says it, but I don't think I've seen any solid arguments behind it. If it's just because you get a lot of less experienced developers using it (for the reasons mentioned in the article), then I fail to see how that is a flaw at all. If you're 12 years old and trying to get started with web development, then you're probably going to use Apache and PHP to do your first "Hello world".
In the grand scheme of things, there are very few websites that actually require a more robust back-end than PHP. Unless you're pulling in millions of hits, you don't have to worry about the inefficiencies of the language.
You haven't looked very hard then:
http://webonastick.com/php.html http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/index.... https://maurus.net/resources/programming-languages/php/