Your comments are very valid for 2014-era PHP, but I'm not sure you understand how much PHP has changed. The benefits PHP offered in 2000 are no longer valid because those are table stakes, absolutely. What about the benefits PHP offers in 2018?
> There has been incredible innovation among software languages since 2000, but PHP has mostly tended to follow a conservative path, mostly imitating Java.
PHP fans like to point out (tongue slightly in cheek) that PHP is the first major language to add modern cryptography to its standard library (libsodium in php 7.2). We can argue about how important that is, but it's also not wrong. And it certainly didn't copy that from Java. :) Further, I think some of your criticisms in the link have also not aged well.
> There has been incredible innovation among software languages since 2000, but PHP has mostly tended to follow a conservative path, mostly imitating Java.
PHP fans like to point out (tongue slightly in cheek) that PHP is the first major language to add modern cryptography to its standard library (libsodium in php 7.2). We can argue about how important that is, but it's also not wrong. And it certainly didn't copy that from Java. :) Further, I think some of your criticisms in the link have also not aged well.