I feel most of the PHP community is pretty mature these days. More pragmatic than Rust, sure but that is a good point in my book. Though I am glad you found your enlightenment.
That stof guy was one of the worst. Inconsistencies, incompatibility. But the dogma was strong.
Indeed they wanted to be the Java of PHP. And so inefficient. Imagine duplicating all variables of a request context for dogmas sake. So you can later do Request->getVar() from their own copy. It shows a basic not understanding of the language.
I can be more specific: I'm identifying problems with the language ecosystem.
I deliberately didn't shit on the people involved; I'll definitely ride the #not-all-php-programmers (I've met some great ones), but it takes a broken mind to accept a toolchain this historically fallible as something with which you'd want to recreate the Java ecosystem. ;-)
Have you tried Java?
It's definitely a better Java than PHP!
But PHP has more to give than just as a birthing ground for teenage programmers.
When I many years later accepted a PHP job as a senior developer, PHP provided a consistent experience of "bad practice everywhere", a fractal of cringe I couldn't ironically reproduce. Working with this for a year taught me a lot about how to deal with critical legacy software beyond repair and being responsible with what you've got.
I think there is no better way to get your hands consistently dirty than with PHP.
Coincidence: I do embedded Rust, and my wife is a buddhist monk. ;-)