I agree that mine -- and many others' -- points of view on PHP are skewed by a sort of a "shameful past". And I agree it's uncharitable. I am facing the same myself in the Elixir community which, despite being a very well-made language with an excellent runtime is still being derided by its lack of strong typing.
So I know your sentiment and I sympathize with it.
I too was a bit too dismissive and I am sorry.
My point was more along the lines of the seeming fact that the PHP community shrunk and, as you said, the original people who made it popular are long gone, likely to never come back. Not sure if anything can be done about it. As a fan of a fringe language I know how it is.
For what it's worth, I only heard good things about Laravel and several other libraries (or frameworks? don't know) along the lines of big productivity boosts.
Here's to hoping that one day all of that will converge somewhere where all of us will have to deal with less BS.
There is a strong, intelligent community backing PHP and working with PHP, and you are dismissing it for things out of their control I feel. You're not taking a realistic perspective on what starting a project with PHP is really like today. It's fast, it has easy deployability, and you can use all the software engineering best practices you so please. Instead you're implying that the abandoned projects from yesteryear are what PHP is about today.
During it's prime, the web exploded with PHP installations built by people who had never touched software before and may never have touched it again, that's what legacy PHP is. It can't be fixed by the PHP community because those installations aren't run by people who are involved in the PHP community. PHP has a very sane upgrade path, but the people who run those installs will never know about it or be interested in it.