I fell in love with PHP in kind of a funny way (and looking at my career now, was probably an indicator I was destined for what I do now) because it saved me during college.

My 2nd to last quarter I had to cram 20 difficult units because of some requirement I had somehow missed. Part of that was a 5 unit web development project/lecture course. Our project was to build an ecommerce site. We were introduced to several paradigms of how to build end to end, PHP being one of them - and as other commenters have noted, what I particularly liked was its ease of deployment.

However, the class at the end pushed everyone towards vanilla JS, which I have never had much success working with and to be honest kind of loathed it. I could not deploy the site with it on the school servers - apparently I wasn't the only one.

So, I looked carefully at the rubric and realized only 20% of it was code evaluation. The rest was site design, and one massive chunk of the grade was simply just getting it deployed by the deadline.

So, I wrote it in php because I knew 1000% it would work and I could get it running on time. The TA wanted to fail the project, but since only 20% of the grade was code, I got a B-. Almost everyone failed because only a few people could get it deployed at all.

I'd love to work on modern PHP projects but don't know where to start or what even is out there, people just scoff at it because it looks horribly ugly and its history of security flaws.