I mean, it's not like that sentiment is totally baseless. I've used PHP years ago and both language and core libraries were not well-designed and came with many footguns. I've heard that modern PHP with frameworks like Laravel fixed a bunch of this, so presumably it's quite capable these days. But PHP certainly wouldn't be anywhere near the top of my go-to list at this point.
Eh, at this point can we just stop with the echoing of old memes? I used PHP4 and have used it continuously up to the modern day. If it's not your choice of language that's fine - language choice is pretty unimportant in the grant scheme of things... that said, it can do everything you need it to do (outside of low level memory control). If you need bit-efficient data structures it isn't going to be a good fit... but compared with most other system programming languages it's fine. I'd even go so far as to say it's one of the leading language in terms of meta-programming at this point with an excellent Reflection suite and great built-in magic methods.
It's alright. I'll be busy getting some easy WordPress work that's fun to do (especially if you use Laravel with it with the roots.io ecosystem) while people are trying to get their obscure Rust blog with leptos/X to compile to WASM so they can deploy it to fly.io and use their remote hosted database for 5 users/month.
I think the point of making the blog on whatever cool tech of the day, instead of wordpress is later getting a job involving said cool tech, not the blog itself.
I really enjoy PHP because it's easy to prototype in, there are a plethora of highly useful libraries for it, it has quite a few mature frameworks[1] and the language syntax is quite powerful.
1. Laravel gets a lot of attention but I'm a huge fan of Zend/Laminas.
I've tried to leave, I've explored outside the relationship. I've dealt with thorns and rough edges. But I've grown, the language and ecosystem have grown and it's been _wonderful_. I truly consider _not leaving_ the PHP ecosystem when I gave an earnest effort to explore elsewhere one of the best decisions I've ever made.
I love to build cool shit and PHP makes that _ridiculously_ easy.