I wrote the "fractal of bad design" article, though, so your biting commentary isn't misdirected. But I stress that I rag on PHP in particular because I feel it does a unique disservice to my field. There are plenty of languages I don't like or otherwise wish to avoid that I haven't felt the need to write a scathing deconstruction of.
Deployment is hard. I deliberately said mod_php seems easy because it still has caveats, and most of the reasons it works have significant downsides in the language. But this is something I think about regularly and am trying to find a solution to.
I mention photography exactly because that snootiness is a double-edged sword: perhaps there are now many more bad photos, but there are also many more photographers, and with that ultimately comes more good photos as well. The road to improvement across the board is always more accessible education + finding a way to marry the convenience of the new easy tools with the power and finesse of the old ones.
In that vein, you may notice that phone camera hardware has been getting increasingly respectable lately, and that people tend to (rightly) gripe when a new phone comes out with a really crappy camera. That's how I feel about PHP: I don't begrudge anyone for using it, but the rest of the field has improved considerably and it's a shame that cruftier equipment is still popular.
I don't know how you can be a good craftsperson without being able to judge the tools at your disposal, for good or for bad. I know why I like Python, and I know what Python lacks that I keep an eye out for in other languages. If you don't like Python, that's fascinating and I would love to know what about your perspective is so radically different, how it could be fixed, how it could be addressed in a similar language, or even what language does it better entirely. The intricate personal attachment to our tools is ridiculous, and discouraging criticism of them will only make us all worse at avoiding the bad ones and designing better ones.