No, you shouldn't build your program out of some overengineered metahyperpolymorphic Proton and Electron base classes in the name of "elegance". But the problem with PHP is that it goes completely to the other extreme: it has no internal consistency and little foresight. Simplicity is a great desideratum, but it shouldn't come at the expense of sense.
He has created something very popular and widely used for an extremely difficult to please market with a huge amount of competition, some of it from scary places. The domain is a hard one.
What pisses me off the most about it is that every person that ever mentions this forgets Facebook, one of the biggest players on the Internet, is built on PHP. (Along with Digg, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Photobucket, SourceForge, Flickr, Yahoo, Friendster, Wordpress/derivatives, Magento........). Not that that is the only language they use, but this is a ridiculous claim to say the least.
Yeah, PHP has faults. So do most languages - but sometimes those faults are also strengths.
Personally, I find coding PHP is like chewing on tinfoil. Nevertheless, it has allowed countless developers to solve problems quickly without having to learn a bunch of boilerplate or internalize elaborate data models.