[krapp]

It's still bad, and there's a lot of bad legacy PHP code out there, but I don't believe it's as bad as it was. Although most new developers working with PHP will probably be hacking wordpress themes and plugins (which don't really have much in the way of best practices other than WP's sometimes infuriating API and mixins as a feature) but others will still end up using a framework like Symfony or Laravel, or Composer to manage dependencies and autoloading.

I don't know if it's even as common as it was to start in PHP without at least touching some kind of framework... although that's just an assumption on my part. At the very least there's a lot more good PHP code out there and better practices to be found, even if education seems like a dauntless task.