But honestly, every language has to make some trade-offs. Even if PHP has some things that are bad design choices as opposed to trade-offs, it can still be worthwhile to put up with them if you have an existing codebase written in it or want to take advantage of libraries that don't exist in other languages.

As a result I don't consider any language as bad or old school. They might have downsides but 1) the upsides might outweigh them in certain use-cases and 2) any competent developer should be able to make something good with any Turing-complete language so I don't judge by the language alone, and especially not by the "hype factor" of the language.

PHP hasn't been considered 'bad' for a few years now. It has been battle tested on many large-scale websites.

Now, One of the main issues is that anyone can write a few lines of code and call themselves a developer, so you have horrible code bases still out there...but this has more to do with the developer than the language.

"my answers to which are "not enough" and "not even if you paid me", respectively

I love hearing answers like this. This is why I'm still paid so well to write PHP code after 15 years in the industry.