Yes, but 2012 is 8 years in the past. Do you know what else is 8 years in the past? Well, not Reacts first release because that happened only in 2013. That's how long 8 years are in web terms.
At some point — and boy, are we long past that point — it feels old when gramps goes off about the woes of PHP4 because, oh, it feels like it's just been yesterday.
This is why PHP deserves it's reputation. The state of the language is one thing, the state of the ecosystem surrounding the language is another.
Anecdotally speaking, the vast majority of PHP projects I've been exposed to have been horrific precisely because there's a laissez-faire or "get the job done at any cost" attitude to software development that's uniquely prevelant in these communities (this exists in all languages, but in my experience it's way worse and way more normalized within the PHP silo). The language improving will only be positive for new projects that are started today, or that have been maintained by dilligent and empathetic engineers. Often teams are not as united on this front as they should be.
I think using almost any other comparable language in 2020 (Python 3, Go, Typescript) is a better solution than starting a new project in PHP these days. I suspect the real reason many still reach for PHP first is because it is "easy" and PHP developers are ostensibly cheap and easy to replace. It's a false economy.
And next you‘re telling how terrible COBOL is? Seems like most/many banks are still running on cobol today...
I think just because something was bad before yesterday does not mean it cannot be used in good ways today or tomorrow. And I think everybody talking bad about PHP should not even think about JavaScript.
Todays PHP gets its job done in a really good way. It has very good frameworks, is amazingly fast and is easy to start with and quite easy to deploy. And it‘s absolutely not comparable to something that was many years ago. And I think too, PHP before something after PHP 5.5 was not „that good“ compared to C# or Java.
At some point — and boy, are we long past that point — it feels old when gramps goes off about the woes of PHP4 because, oh, it feels like it's just been yesterday.