I'm in the group described halfway down: was on the Internet during PHP 5, lost interest in it, and moved on [to Go]. I haven't written anything in PHP newer than version 5. Even transitioning from 4 to 5 was quite a big deal, I definitely noticed improvements. But it wasn't enough. I couldn't fit the data set in memory with PHP. But I could do it with Go. I couldn't do parallel computations in PHP in order to respon…
PHP was the right tool at the time especially when everything on the web was somewhat Wordpress first. PHP felt like a blast with WAMP/LAMP.
Since then I have moved on and honestly it never occurred to me, that PHP still could be an option in my tech stacks, neither one of my devs recommended it.
No one hates or disliked PHP, there are simply other options.
Looking back, recommending PHP today feels like "You can do this with jQuery, too" in the Frontend domain. Yes, you can, but maybe you shouldn't or only if you have the right people. And PHP is a rare skill now.