Everyone laughing at PHP hasn't tried it for years, I'd bet. It started clumsy, true, but it became a solid and quite elegant way of doing things. And by things I don't mean just web development. The current limitations I see in PHP is that there is not an official multi-core coroutines solution.
I've used PHP recently to work on Phabricator, and the whole "yes it sucked but now it's good" narrative did not match my experience at all. Sure it might have added modern features but the core is still rotten. The alternative would have to be TCL levels of bad to make me choose PHP.
If you can do as little as possible in PHP and rely on the low level functions to stitch together what you need, deserialize and render data in the front end, use front-end templating, then PHP is insanely fast, practical language.
The issues with PHP are usually when people build out giant frameworks in PHP, rather than using PHP as a higher level glue language for the built-in fast C functions.