It was very well deserved back in the pre-7.0 days, when it was common to have horrific spaghetti projects with zero structure, global variables/functions everywhere, and all kinds of logic (including database calls) mixed into view templates. Modern PHP is a whole different world, but most people will simply choose something else now because that stigma is impossible to lose, and finding dedicated PHP developers is increasingly uncommon.
I disagree. You can't slap on features on a bad language and make it good language. You can only make it more palatable.
Good languages start good because the people who designed and built them had good idea of what they wanted to achieve and did not have existing users to compromise with.
A great developer will write great code in any language/framework. A bad developer will write bad code in any language/framework. I have seen this so many times in my 25+ years of developing software and don’t expect this to change anytime soon.
I still dont like PHP in any sort of way, as a programming language it really is the bottom of my list. At least modern php is easier to swallow.
But Laravel, the amount of things that could get done in so little time. I think laravel took all the good ideas from Rails and ran way further ahead with it.
Also, Laravel collections are amazing. They make working with arrays and transforming data a breeze.