I agree!
6 years ago when I started with web, as a total newbie, decision was to use Ruby on Rails. I gave up after day or two, I didn't understand how to start with this thing. And I was pissed of. Then I wrote few lines and save it as .php, upload to hosting which I already had, and things worked. I'm still using php to this day.
Where languages like Ruby had Rails and Python had Django, PHP was able to do things quickly without having a framework on top of it. That, coupled with clear design flaws and a standard library that lacked, well, standardization, made it an easy and deserving target for criticism. PHP was also slow to adopt objects, namespaces, package management and other things developers came to expect.