Honestly the author doesn't even make a great case that PHP has improved since 2009. His arguments mostly seemed to be "don't use the old busted way, there's a better way now". But if you have to go out of your way to remember to not use the old busted way, sooner or later you will shoot yourself in the foot. Having good defaults matters, and the author seems to ignore that.
I think you're underestimating how hard it is to shoot yourself in the foot when using the PHP language defaults and the defaults for any modern PHP framework - it's genuinely hard to do.
I still don't think PHP is a good idea for a greenfield project or anything, but they have done a good job of hiding all the footguns.
> I think you're underestimating how hard it is to shoot yourself in the foot when using the PHP language defaults and the defaults for any modern PHP framework - it's genuinely hard to do.
Agreed. I remember happily starting a couple of new PHP projects in the last decade and the frameworks felt like working in any other programming language.