A willingness to code C but not C++ is just silliness. You can complain that the language is too big, but everything in it is there to solve serious engineering problems. Complaining about it just shows you are not serious about engineering.
It's OK not to be serious about engineering. Most people aren't, and don't want to be. The honest thing is to say so, instead of complaining about the language.
It depends at what abstraction level of problem solving you work at. Some people work at the 'we need programmers to implement x feature on our system using y language' level, and that quote is appropriate. There are people that make a lot of money maintaining COBOL systems for banks, that we all benefit from.
Some work at the 'there is this problem, what do we build to solve it?' level (myself usually included). In that case you have more scope to choose the right tool for the job, and a lot of the time the tradeoff is not favourable for PHP past the first week.