I mean you’re just incorrect about the C++ vs C comparison here.

PHP is a memory safe language, just as memory safe as Java, C# and JS. The runtime itself has very few vulnerabilities and bugs, and is quite mature. There’s no “drop down into C” type thing in PHP, where you can just write unsafe code whenever you want. The closest thing is extensions, which operate on the runtime itself.

In the past 10 years, the PHP runtime has had little to no exploitable vulnerabilities. The V8 runtime has had much more. Mostly because their implementation is much more complex.

The PHP language was hacky in the very early days, but for over a decade now it’s been mature and professional. It’s basically just dotnet.