As a PHP developer, I think you are right. In last few years PHP changed a lot! Ofcourse like every tool it's sometimes used wrong way, thats why people complain.
Te biggest problem with PHP is just the mountains of old legacy code and what still passes for "good". The new beta of Wordpress for instance is still largely procedural and untestable, yet powers something like 60% of the web.
Well, to be fair, the flipside to that are some of these new PHP frameworks that attempt to include every pattern known to man and are buried under mountains of worthless abstractions.
