There's trash projects in every language, and I'm not defending any of them. The terrible projects you have seen are written by terrible programmers, of which y

There's trash projects in every language, and I'm not defending any of them. The terrible projects you have seen are written by terrible programmers, of which you have a lot in any popular language. But modern PHP, with Laravel, Symfony, Composer, and not least of all the features of PHP 8 are unequivocally excellent and as good as or in many ways better than what is standard in the rest of the industry, and most certainly not "amateur hour".