I think that people defending PHP are getting a point you (and OP) are missing: both PHP (the language) and its ecosystem matured a great deal in the last 2-3 y

I think that people defending PHP are getting a point you (and OP) are missing: both PHP (the language) and its ecosystem matured a great deal in the last 2-3 years. A lot of good ideas were either implemented into the language or ported over from other languages/frameworks. There are tools/frameworks that rival those in Python/Ruby land.