As a Clojure developer, I see plenty of things that might be better in PHP in language design (making existing syntax more powerful instead of adding more syntax), implementation (make sure there are no memory leaks for example), stdlib (make one big incompatible release and make sure all functions have consistent naming & parameters & return values).
But today, in the age of PHP 7, frameworks and thousands of libraries, short requests that make memleaks insignificant, I think PHP is an awesome productive language. A language purist who loves elegance (like me) would not take a fancy of PHP, but the same goes for Go, C, C++, Lua and in some way also Vala, D. These languages are just highly practical hammers. Nothing to love, nothing to play with. But boy, these hammers are highly productive and in the right hands and appropriate situation, they are very hard to outcompete.
For some people, using PHP can be the best solution (Do you know C-like languages? Are libs you need in composer? For such a person PHP might be a way to get the result fast).
1. The meme where someone sits in a burning house or room and says "It's fine.".
2. "Sweet lemons". That is the sort of psychological "strategy" that is often applied and that seems to be used here: Things are bad, so lets talk them good. It all sounds like "Oh come on, it's not so bad!", but that is not the point. The point is, that compared with more developed languages, things are objectively worse with PHP and no one should have to deal with its issues.
There are issues in programming languages, which cannot be fixed, except for making far fetching design changes to the language itself, unless you include the required tools inside the language, for modifying the language itself. Those are called macros usually, and I am not talking about C preprocessor macros.
To fix a lot of the issues PHP would have to change to a degree, where it is no longer PHP and it does not include the required tools for changing the language itself. It requires a commitee, which is apparently unwillig to fix the language, or is so slow at it, that we still have PHP in its current form after "25 years of PHP".