I've done more projects in PHP than I would care to admit. I ported the University of Chicago's "Uncommon Application" from Cold Fusion to PHP using an OO data access model, MVC, and explicit templates. (This was a long time ago before people realized that MVC was a bad idea.)

I've also hacked up a bunch of open source projects (wordpress, joomla). No tests, so you never know what you've fucked up, and you spend more time checking for regressions than actually adding that one feature you want. That's not how you do large scale software development, that's how you add pack on billable hours by charging your client for the same work 100 times.

Really, it's boils down to taste more than anything else. I've yet to see a tasteful application written in PHP.

If I were to summarize it with one anti-pattern, it's that PHP encourages people to mix unrelated parts of the program into one place, making testing, maintenance, and understanding nearly impossible. I should be able to test your app's interface without having a database. I should be able to write a database query without reading any code that touches HTML. And it's something I never see in PHP code.