The thing that pisses me off about people who complain about PHP is that all these smarty pants people have pointed out the flaws in PHP, but never really understood why it was successful, and because of that they never created a language that could succeed it. The things that made PHP successful were:

1. It just werked. You could write incredibly shitty code and it, like HTML, would work as long as there wasn't a fatal error. And sure you could just say "git gud", but that's not going to happen. People will just use the best language that works for them, and in this case, it was PHP.

2. It required very few resources to run low to medium traffic websites. Because of the Apache mod_php module, PHP sites wouldn't use any resources if they weren't being served, unlike every other language at the time. So it meant places could host thousands of websites on the same server no proble.

The guy who created PHP, Rasmus Leerdorf, never wanted and never expected that PHP would become as popular as it has. He has mentioned that he thought that at any moment, someone was going to come around and create a language that would succeed PHP. But it never happened. People are just better at pointing and complaining instead of solving the issues that people want solved.