It is ok to have a preference to do non web work with PHP but you owe it to yourself to at least try something else before saying you prefer it over everything else.
There is nothing wrong with $ though. That’s just insane. Also I’m very excited to see Drupal 9 being released with twig 2 support and more recent symfony support. I just think you should at least evaluate other options before saying “everything goes better with php sauce” just like the JavaScript crowd should stop and get some help before using JavaScript for native development and or server side development.
He never implied anything remotely similar.
On a serious note, I find the JS ecosystem more annoying than PHP. Modern frameworks like Laravel (Laravel is nice to work with), PHP is more than enough for its intended use - web applications. PHP 7 has good performance improvements too.
Well, if you had a dollar every time you typed one... ;)