I think your two points about Xdebug and PHP naming conventions aren't a fair lense on PHP as a whole. Seems that they're framed around how wordpress uses PHP (poorly) for some of the more basic abstractions.
You aren't likely to find those issues in any modern PHP Framework out the box.
That's why I'm bringing it up in the conversation of WordPress. The platform has probably the largest slice of PHP developers out there and lack of proper debugging techniques and an ancient-feeling codebase drives a lot of the negativity towards PHP. It's giving the language a bad name. Laravel is a wonderful framework and helped me bridge the gap towards .NET, as I was a self taught WordPress dev to start with.
You aren't likely to find those issues in any modern PHP Framework out the box.