You either got hit by an avalanche of bad information or prefer to remain ignorant.
What would any of us do if some innovation never happened? How does Facebook committing heavily to PHP and then giving back in the form of performance enhancements somehow tar PHP as crap? What language or framework with any longevity didn't have something like that happen? Is Javascript crap if not for Typescript, or V8?
You may not make PHP your first choice but plenty of businesses and developers do. If you can point to some actual reasons no one should choose PHP, or widespread failures due solely to flaws in PHP, go ahead.
This is a pretty silly take. It's like saying that performance improvements in the Java runtime and advanced garbage collectors like G1GC and ZGC are evidence of the weakness of Java.
> Admittedly PHP has had recent performance gains, but by no means would it ever be a first choice in any backend service architecture.
Other than at Yahoo, Facebook, ...
Don't get me wrong; PHP has issues. But it's very mature; it's fast; it's easy to learn; it has a very diverse and rich ecosystem; it's easy to debug; and in general, it's very useful for building reasonably efficient and performant scalable web services.
What would you do if HHVM didn't even exist?
Admittedly PHP has had recent performance gains, but by no means would it ever be a first choice in any backend service architecture.