As someone that used PHP professionally for literal decades, the PHP hate is so meme-y.

Its biggest problem is that it allows you to do some truly cursed things. The same can be said about other languages, but PHP really doesn't do much to set you up for success, especially as a new-intermediate coder.

With opcache, it became fast enough for basically most web backends, and as a language overall it does seem to be evolving and shedding off some of the crap that used to make it truly horrible in the hands of a new person. At least the type-juggling stupiderrors

Now I mainly use go and python (only because I have to on this one), and I would put Python and PHP on a similar level of "fuck this language" moments