PHP has some excellent ideas that other languages can't replicate, while at the same time having terrible ideas that other languages don't have to think about. Overall a huge fan of modern PHP, thanks for this writeup.
Perhaps more precisely: the defacto Apache-as-runtime + PHP model simplifies a ton of things. Namely your request state is created and destroyed all within the context of a single process, and you don't have to reason about shared state with other in-flight requests (unless you explicitly choose to go this route). It makes some bad programming patterns workable, because your state doesn't linger over a long-running period. Deploys are also super fast, you just have to swap the application code on disk and it'll get picked up on the next request (in-flight requests will keep processing with the old version IIRC). It's productive if not necessarily pretty. Also it has a type system now!
As a related thought, a lot of the modern serverless stuff feels like it's reinventing the ideas of Apache + PHP, or perhaps CGI?