PHP is a very different language than 15 years ago, and large applications are pretty much indistinguishable from Java or dotnet. The type system is more cohesive than JS or even Python at this point.

But still, why would I work with it? The language is crap, I guess now there are enough abstractions to hide it but they can do only so much. You're still writing $variables and calling the array_* methods etc. at some point. I'd rather work with languages that don't have this legacy crap with them. I also avoid Perl fwiw.