The community contributing in the PHP runtime and the community developing projects in PHP are two separate things. While the language itself has been evolving

The community contributing in the PHP runtime and the community developing projects in PHP are two separate things. While the language itself has been evolving there are still a lot of bad quality PHP based projects and this has to do more with the low barrier of entry rather than PHP being a bad language on its own or the people contributing in it being bad developers. The last few years there's been a lot of good effort put in the language itself and it shows with the latest releases.