I am with you all the way. For a high level programming language it’s incredible how close to C it is at times AND how many footguns the entire language has.
And you always hear the “a poor craftsman blames his tools” analogy when someone says PHP bad. But PHP is a hammer that’ll blow your arm clean off when you hit a nail at a slightly off angle.
There is no defending it, and it should have been replaced with better languages several times over.
Ok I need to stop myself now I can rant about this language for hours