That's definitely been my impression. I used to be a professional PHP developer, still use it occasionally for personal projects, and appreciate the language, warts and all, even if I can't truly say I love* it -- but I'm only half-joking when I quip that PHP has evolved from its roots as a cargo cult version of Perl into a cargo cult version of Java.
It's a joke in so far as it is funny - but it's absolutely correct. When you only look at the language... When looking at the VM, Java has an absolutely world class VM, with great engineering and decades worth of research poured into it.
PHP has... no such thing.
To give PHP its due, it can be very fast -- although the more you use it "the modern, right way," the slower it seems to get. I can't help but wonder how much of that is an impedance mismatch between "your program starts over from scratch with every HTTP request" and "structure your program so that by the time every class is instantiated and interface is implemented, ten thousand lines of code have been processed with each request." No matter how great its optimization and caching may be, a Laravel or Symfony app just has a whole lot of overhead relative to any framework in another language that doesn't have PHP's zero-state approach.
Haha so true... the first time I stepped through a running Laravel app line-by-line in debug mode in order to understand it better, I was worried my F11 key was going to wear out ;)
That is completely ignored by the community
It's not my favoured governance model, but it is what it is.
They are notably absent, and so people who write modern PHP - or wish PHP was a different language - are the ones influencing language development.