Most of my projects in the last 10 years have been PHP based. I still think it has to change. There are much nicer alternatives (like Python). The reason PHP is still so common is the low learning curve. This also attracts bad programmers who create abominations someone else has to work with.

Some changes are more related to the runtime environment, like the whole configuration mess that the article mentions.

I also think the PHP community lacks brilliant developers. There are many okay and even good developers. But most PHP applications nowadays look at Java and the abundance of design patterns that often don't make sense in a web environment where application lifetime is usually a few years not decades. Look at Zend Framework. It can do anything. But you need to write so much boilerplate code that all the flexibility a scripting language offers is lost.

The PHP community needs to figure out what it wants to be. If I want to use something that is very verbose I will use Java. If I want to move fast I will use Ruby or Python. At the moment PHP seems to be somewhere in between.

As long as nothing fundamental changes I will only use PHP when getting paid. For anything I do for fun I will use other languages.