[nikdaheratik]

I've spent basically two years working to convert a legacy project built on PHP 5.x into Laravel on PHP 7.x and I can agree that it's come a long way as a language, and that frameworks like this help.

The biggest issues, however, are not technical but are based on changes in the development philosophy overall. The legacy project was written by people who envied Java and its object system and wanted to make everything an object. Laravel (and similar projects) have moved towards something that is a mix of object-based approaches and Functional/Lispy approaches. This puts it more in line with the direction alot of languages (JS, Rust, etc) have been taking.

TL;DR: PHP is in a better place than it's been in awhile, largely because it's willing to borrow good ideas and execute them while still being able to make use of its legacy libraries when needed.