PHP is amazing

If you're thinking of PHP version less than 8 you need to have another look

Totally stateless. Uncached server side rendered response times in double digit milliseconds.

Types

Extremely battle, highly tested frameworks.

Excellent tooling for tdd, bdd, static analysis, automated browser testing, coding standards and auto fixing. Even fully automated refactoring for things like package upgrades (Rector)

Regular, solid, releases bringing updates and fixes

Arguably one of the best package management systems, Composer. And only one, none of this constantly changing tooling that some other ecosystems seem to do

Properly open source platforms to power all kinds of web projects from e-commerce, CRM, social, scraping, analytics, monitoring, API, CMS, blogging

Basically if your target is server side web stuff then it's really good

Or, you can continue to demonstrate how out of touch you are by continuing with the old "PHP bad" jokes if you want!