I think that most of the things people hate about PHP are the things that make it work. It doesn't force you into a particular paradigm, and it all but encourages mixing PHP and HTML together into one horrifying but incredibly convenient stew. It doesn't force you to write clean, elegant or secure code (you can, but it doesn't hold your hand in that regard.) A lot of it is still just wrappers around c. You're not chained to a package manager (although you can use one if you want) or a framework (although you can pick one of many.)
And yet, for almost everything people want to do when they want to put something on the web, it's not only perfectly adequate, but in some ways more efficient than other languages. Most of the web is still CRUD anyway. Take stuff from a database, iterate it, insert it into html, serve html. Or maybe do all that, and serve json instead. This is still far, far easier to do in PHP than it is other languages.
That said, as a professional PHP developer, there is still plenty about the language that drives me up the wall. I think anyone who works with it and is serious will admit there are issues with the language. But no one can say it isn't battle-tested, or that it doesn't make it easy to get something up and out onto the web.
And yet, for almost everything people want to do when they want to put something on the web, it's not only perfectly adequate, but in some ways more efficient than other languages. Most of the web is still CRUD anyway. Take stuff from a database, iterate it, insert it into html, serve html. Or maybe do all that, and serve json instead. This is still far, far easier to do in PHP than it is other languages.
That said, as a professional PHP developer, there is still plenty about the language that drives me up the wall. I think anyone who works with it and is serious will admit there are issues with the language. But no one can say it isn't battle-tested, or that it doesn't make it easy to get something up and out onto the web.