I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full display in many legacy codebases, but modern PHP is something I actually find to be fairly pleasant to develop with, far more than Go or vanilla JavaScript.

A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.

No. Bad rep comes from developers who used other languages and never looked back.

I did PHP for 15 years. Modern PHP looks good but I still wouldn't go back.