After like a 10 years of coding in everything except PHP I actually started missing PHP. Everything is so bloated nowadays and all the shit that gets thrown towards the PHP is mostly just a BS from those that either never coded in PHP or stopped coding before PHP 5.6.
Everything works if you know it well enough. But what I remember annoying me with php most was the naming convention mess, array_search, count, strlen, etc.
Is php worth hating? I did some in college and didn't care for it. I don't remember exactly why though. I built a POC super simple MVC framework and found it really easy to implement. But then I moved on to other stuff (java/ruby/python/js) and promptly forgot about it.
Modern PHP shits all over the PHP v3, v4, v5 days of yore.
Anyone making new projects from scratch is living in a land of bliss while those working in projects/frameworks that started in the days of yore are having experiences across the whole spectrum of, "Wow, I sure am glad we migrated to modern php" to "please kill me, I'm in so much pain".