I think you nailed the answer to the question. Many people are going to come in and answer a different question (why PHP kinda sucks), while willfully ignoring

I think you nailed the answer to the question. Many people are going to come in and answer a different question (why PHP kinda sucks), while willfully ignoring that you can make pretty reasonable arguments about why any language/framework/environment kinda sucks. PHP seems to get a special amount of hate because to most of us PHP coder means newb because that's what we were when we wrote PHP. It's main strength is as a server-side rendering language, with everything else bolted on. That's fine if your requirements are simple. It's not really practical to make that work side-by-side with mobile clients. Developers are finding languages that provide asynchronous (node) or concurrent (golang) features to be more important when you're mapping data from many different sources to json output. It's worth noting that Ruby and Python don't really provide those things either, but have much better reputations as back-end languages. I don't think that will last though. I can easily picture a world where people say, "LOL Ruby! That's what we used in boot camp!"