People have the habit of looking down from tall towers at languages like PHP but refuse to see that even there own languages share some of the same flaws they accuse PHP off.

Trow a beginner in C/C++/Rust and you will see the same behavior. Improved programming knowledge and practices comes from experience. In any language...

Yesterday we had somebody with supposed 4 years professional experience coming for a PHP job interview. Even easy problems like:

$x = 5;
echo $x+++$x++;  // What is the number that will be displayed
echo $x;  // What is the number that will be displayed

This person struggled with it ( actually got it wrong ). But he was Zend certified and applied for a Senior PHP developer job. sigh. He did not even try to write out ($x++) + ($x++) to more clearly understand.

But the same can also happen in any other language. No matter how much a language forces a person to learn specific concepts like stack/heap, mutable/unmutable, ownership, gc ... most people only get good with experience. Its just easier for people to get started in PHP resulting in a lower grade of programmers. And that is what people then blame the language for, yet they forget the massive amount of "low grade" programmers that actually become excelled senior programmers.