I assure you the actual writers of Laravel know why Laravel (or Lumen) is good and why they made decisions they made. I promise you the Facebook PHP engineers who worked on HHVM and Hack know best practices and PHP really well (and know how to write a multithreaded socket server and understand TCP).
I also promise you that there are engineers that work all over the place (like non pure tech companies like banks and insurance companies) that don't look at Java as craft. They use Spring cause it's "good" and have written the DAO pattern 100s of times cause it "works". I bet the vast vast vast vast majority of Java Spring developers have not read Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development and actually understand WHY Spring was invented.
Knowing Java doesn't create some magical space where you suddenly know the TCP protocol state diagram. That's just a silly statement. I promise ANY average developer of ANY language can NOT spit out a bare metal implementation of TCP. Hell, I bet the average Java developer doesn't know the difference between UDP and TCP (or the average php developer, average python developer, average ruby developer, you get what I'm saying)
PHP is a language. One that is as performant as it's peers, has a large presence on the internet, and is battle-tested. If you instinctively shit on PHP developers, that's something you need to work on.
And, just to be clear, I don't CODE IN PHP and never have. I just know people who are brilliant who do and also deal with some PHP buried in my company to this day (like pretty much every tech company).