I would argue that Kotlin is the better modern PHP. Beside of a lot of magic Laravel makes PHP okayish, but it is still the worse mainstream programming language.
Please back this up.
Some hints why I think PHP is not great:
* property type declaration in doc-strings * bad documentation * verry verbose for a dynamic language * a lot of inconsistencies * automatically loading of classes is a hack (psr4) which doesn't support importing functions without specifying it in a global project file
Well, this is still true.