The language isn’t perfect but I love working with it, these 8.1 and 8.2 improvements have really made it sweet.
My biggest gripe at the moment is the (very old) behavior of e.g. preg_match() and sort(). You’ve got a small handful of these common functions that operate on their input by reference/in place which is gross. A new version of these would be welcome.
Great! Keep using it! Ignore us. We (detractors) also had to use it and have since learned (hopefully several) other languages that (not looking at you JS) we like much better... :)