I never really understood these complaints about the standard library, that's not what makes a language really. Yes, it's ugly, yes, it carries 30 years of baggage, but it's PHP the language that allows you to interact with a much more convenient abstraction layer provided by Laravel.

PHP can run the same code fully dynamically typed or with very strict type annotations, depending on your requirements. It has runtime reflection APIs that are so cheap that you don't really have to think about using them. You can do OOP or FP with PHP, or even procedural HTML-interleaved-with-PHP if that's your thing. It has late static binding, so you can defer to child classes from their parent class. There are generators and fibres as first-class language constructs now. Property hooks are an extremely clear pattern, way better than in many other languages.

Generally, there have been tons of new syntax extensions over the years, and they all slot in gracefully. With PHP 8.6, we're going to get partial application for functions, which will make PHP 8.5's match expressions one of the most ergonomic implementations I have seen yet!

Ecosystem? The JS/TS ecosystem approach is to use as many libraries as possible for the sake of it, exposing you to a massive supply chain risk. PHP doesn't suffer from that because there are barely any libraries for it.