One thing I'd like to highlight though is that there were mountains of terrible advice out there around PHP from novices who had figured out a way to make thing

One thing I'd like to highlight though is that there were mountains of terrible advice out there around PHP from novices who had figured out a way to make things work - around the time of PHP 5.3 the community ran an ambitious initiative to crawl through sites like Stack Overflow and replace bad answers with correct ones. The community realized how dangerous it was for novices and how much all the bad advice was hurting the reputation of the language and they took decisive action to fix it. Separately, IMO, languages should always be designed with bad programmers in mind - good programmers are going to figure out the right way to do things in any language but bad programmers are going to fire off every foot gun they can find. PHP has made efforts to remove or de-emphasize foot guns and it has evolved into a much safer tool to give someone.