Agreed, PHP is not beginner friendly even if it might seem so at first.
The lack of built-in XSS prevention in PHP makes it quite terrible as templating language, especially for beginners who probably have never heard of XSS. The same applies to the simplciity of string interpolation combined with the terrible built-in MySQL driver which makes parametrized queries harder than they should be. All this used to be even more confused by the Magic Quotes in previous versions of PHP.
With so many security traps it is not a language I would recommend for beginners who just want to build something that works.
I would wager that a language designed for beginners wouldn't have so much inconsistency, nor dump the user in a world of security issues with little or no support (XSS, CSRF, SQL injection).
Other people have worked around these issues, but that demonstrates the lack of support within the language.