It's certainly convenient for getting started, but I think he wants to say that the drawbacks of choosing PHP outweigh the benefits.

I started out with Java, moved on to Python, and now I'm using Clojure. Every language & ecosystem -combination is some sort of trade-off, but one could reasonably make the case that Clojure is the best trade-off currently available.

Whatever he does, he should not get stuck using PHP because there are much better tools available.