> The issue was never "weirdness" but rather poor design.
To me all weirdness IS poor design.
> JavaScript was a joke but modern js is tight, clean and generally very fast.
Fast it sure is, for an interpreted language.
On "clean and tight" I beg to differ. I find it an unholy mess: the language, the stdlib and the ecosystem.
> To me all weirdness IS poor design.
Weirdness is subjective. If you look at lisp for the first time coming from other languages it will be weird.
PHP had glaring issues for years, but they started to clean up the language around 7.x.
JavaScript was effectively a toy but grew up in a hurry when Node pushed ecmascript forward and into a well paced release pattern.
PHP was quite fairly maligned for a long time. The issue was never "weirdness" but rather poor design. Starting with final 5.x they started turning it around and deprecating or fixing a lot of the worst bits.
JavaScript was a joke but modern js is tight, clean and generally very fast.