It really depends what you call a language. I find it interesting how developers can be to 3 different things with the word language : the actual language, the language + standard library or even the language + standard + ecosystem. So a sentence like "PHP has come a long way. It's a proper language now, etc." will mean very different things to different people.

The heart of PHP (not the standard library binding C libraries part) do have come a very long way. Even the things that look the same to you on surface have change under the hood and are way more performant thanks to it.