PHP made it way too simple to go from a basic installation -> serving web pages, just using it's standard library. You're right -- that was it's intended use-case and while it made for a dead-easy user experience, it also planted lots of traps that users fell into in droves.

Where languages like Ruby had Rails and Python had Django, PHP was able to do things quickly without having a framework on top of it. That, coupled with clear design flaws and a standard library that lacked, well, standardization, made it an easy and deserving target for criticism. PHP was also slow to adopt objects, namespaces, package management and other things developers came to expect.