See, the thing is, PHP has gotten better. That's not in dispute. The problem is that, even after it "has gotten better", it's still far behind most other options that are commonly in use, and still highly inconsistent and upredictable. It is rather telling in and of itself when you have to use "well, it has gotten better" as a crutch to argue that, at least, it meets a minimum standard of viability.
Frameworks don't really solve this problem. Fundamentally, you're still working with a language that does some really weird things - things that are weird enough to cause near-untraceable bugs and completely unexpected vulnerabilities. You can slap a lot of abstraction onto it, and it does make it less unwieldy, but in the end you're still limited by what the language or platform has to offer you in terms of inherent consistency, predictability, and debuggability.
Just take, for example, PHP's CGI-like nature. Yes, it is theoretically possible to have a long-running process, and it's theoretically possible to implement real-time services with it, but it's going to be a major headache and incredibly hard to maintain. The tools are just not really there. Any solution you come up with will, in the end, be a giant hack.
Don't assume that somebody who cringes at PHP is just somebody who likes jumping on bandwagons. There are very real and rational reasons to dislike PHP, even (especially!) as an experienced PHP developer.