What changes made the language worse? I use both for my job and find php 8 way more pleasant.
It broke adding properties dynamicly to objects.
It broke easy string handling for many functions where null was rendered as an empty string. This is especially annoying as you often get null values from the database. It makes sense to have a null value for "Don't know the color of the car" in the DB. And it makes sense to render it as "Color: " in the user interface. The easy string conversion always was one of the strengths of PHP.
It feels like Java all over again.