I've not used PHP in anger in well over a decade, but if the general environment out there is anything like it was back then there are likely a lot of people, mostly on cheap shared hosting arrangements, running PHP versions older than that and for the most part knowing no better.

That isn't the fault of the language of course, but a valid reason for some of the “ick” reaction some get when it is mentioned.

PHP had its issues like every language, but also a minimal memory footprint, XML/SOAP parser, and several SQL database cursor options.

Most modern web languages like nodejs are far worse due to dependency rot, and poor REST design pattern implementations. =3