It's only hated by those who haven't grokked modern php > 7.0. Thanks to laravel the php ecosystem has grown quite a bit over the past few years. I know many rails devs who prefer laravel/php to rails for what it brings to the table. Sure ruby is prettier syntax, but php isn't as horrible as it used to be. Now if it could catch up on parallel/asynch it'd have a better time.

Sure there's sexier languages like elixir and go and rust, but well designed php code is a pleasure to work w/.