Even after years of not building anything substantial with PHP, it still maintains a soft spot in my heart. I remember how it felt writing PHP code ~15 years ago and feeling so productive. I felt that I could do anything with it. Then the Laravel framework came around and made that experience at least an order of magnitude better.

I think the main issue for PHP nowadays is the curse that it had many issues (especially security-wise) in the past and so many folks believe that the PHP of today is still the PHP of the past, when in actuality, it's evolved into a pretty dope programming language/environment with some pretty decent features. It seems like this is something that the PHP community can't shake no matter how hard they try.