That's pretty much how it is, but I believe the why is largely to do with the large amount of bad PHP learning aides available for free on the internet (I'm looking at you, w3schools).

That being said, I have met (and work with) some "PHP first" programmers who are genuinely great programmers, and who get how to write clean, reusable code. "I learnt in PHP" isn't a blanket euphemism for "I'm a horrible programmer".