People love to hate on PHP then love to love JavaScript. It's bonkers. PHP is clearly better than JavaScript, it's just that we're all forced to use JS.
Examples off the top of my head:
* Lists and dictionaries being the same data type ("array"). This makes it impossible to distinguish between an empty list and an empty dictionary, good luck encoding that JSON.
* Arrays are pass-by-value
* '123' == '+123' evaluates to true
* '0' == '0.000' evaluates to true
* `$a = true; $b = false; $c = $a and $b;`, $c evaluates to `true`
* Closures requiring you to explicitly list every variable from the parent scope you want to use
* References (&$var) have a lot of footguns
* array_key_exists and property_exists taking opposite parameter orders
* stdlib naming in general being pretty bad, with the stated justification being that strlen() was used as a hash function in early PHP versions, so functions were named to achieve an even distribution: http://news.php.net/php.internals/70691
* The null-coalescing operator is also an are these even valid identifiers-coalescing operator – here $result is 2:
$myvariable['x'] = 1;
$result = $myvvvvariiiiableee['x'] ?? 2;
All those bad things about PHP you've listed go well with Gary Bernhardt's WTF video about JS's inconsistency.
JavaScript is not well-designed however you squint at it, and claims that it's gotten better must come from people that have not used any other language before.