I these kinds of jokes are kind of embarrassing and I’ve only heard from novices or developers who haven’t touched PHP in decades. Note I don’t write PHP at all these days since it’s not the best tool to solve the problems I work on.
Modern PHP is rather excellent. Laravel is lovely, Composer is solid. Language has pretty much everything one could want for, even optional strict typing.
PHP is laughed at because it traditionally was one of the first languages novices sunk their teeth into, especially as the whole web2.0 thing captured everyone’s attention.
Even the best tool can be wielded poorly by a fool. I’ve seen some absolutely shocking Rust by Bevy users and don’t get me started on enterprise Java applications.
When I hear a developer shit on PHP, all I hear is a shit developer. (Unless they’re making a truly reasonable justification such as strict modes lack of warning as ints are cast to floats or whatever)