> The ones who fly into a rage over it seem to be people who don't actually use it!

Well, that does make some sense: if something bothers you so much that you'd "fly into a rage over it", you would avoid using it as much as possible (and PHP is not like JavaScript which has no real alternative).

The annoying thing is more that a ton of the ones that fly into a rage are also ones that have never used it. There is a ton of dog-piling in what people complain about.

> The annoying thing is more that a ton of the ones that fly into a rage are also ones that have never used it.

Even that does make some sense: if, on a first look, you see something you deeply dislike, you probably will also avoid using it in the first place.

As a personal example, I never learned Go because, when I first looked at it (IIRC, it was when I had to use it to run a Heartbleed detector), I deeply disliked the way it required developers to organize their source code (a single per-language directory mixing all projects together, instead of the per-project directories I have always used); I understand this might have changed later, but in the meantime I invested my time in learning another programming language, and so far haven't found a need to look at Go again.

Ish? You are, of course, more than welcome to not like things. Dislike them, even. Really, you are more than welcome to dog pile on things, freedom and all of that. It is still annoying and generally not a healthy activity, from my point of view.