Suppose you had a old car. You know its limitations, you've used it for many, many years. You know its problems, its quirks and warts. You also know the workarounds for its quirks. In all, it is good enough for most of your needs. It rarely surprises you. It is average looking, but it just runs and is easier to maintain.

Then comes the shiny new car - it has way too many gadgets and gizmos, you don't know how most of them work. Heck, you don't even know what half these gadgets are for. You don't know when or how it will break. But most importantly, you don't know how to fix something when it breaks, because there is too much magic going on. High maintenance, constant stress.

The first case is PHP. People can dunk on it all day, every day. But it is good enough for most projects. And with tools like Laravel, Composer etc, PHP is constantly improving too.

The latter? I dunno, there are lots of candidates for it I suppose.