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.
PHP just happens to be good at getting stuff done fast, so it's found all over the place, and thus has a lot of eyeballs on it. The negativity is a byproduct of it's usefulness and staying power - the price of popularity, if you will.
I love PHP, especially with the new event loop based modules that let you do things asynchronously, much like Node or Go.
If you know how to use it well, PHP is awesome, and it's getting better with each release.
I don't like arguments like these because they're a tu quoque without even bothering to point out flaws in a different thing. It implicitly states that progress is impossible, that all languages will always be as bad, and nothing can ever improve because once a technology is widely-used, design flaws will magically appear. If you really believe that, write your next website backend in FORTRAN IV.
It was lazy argumentation when it was people saying Linux was just as buggy as Windows Me and it's lazy argumentation now.