I agree. At it's PHP is just a template language. There are many great PHP MVC framworks that have evolved over the years to incorporate many "best practices". The choice should be up to the developer depending on the project.
I don't know of many "template languages" that treat classes as first-class citizens, has an in-depth, thorough unit testing framework, traits, closures, and and and.
I'm sure you get my idea? PHP may have been much simpler at its inception - it is not the same beast now.
I hate when PHP pops up here on HN, 90% of the people flapping their gabs don't or haven't used PHP for many many years, and when they did it was some Indian's crap code so they spend their time talking shit about a language because they had to fix a bug in Hinderbar's PHP spaghetti from 2003.
Everyone is capable of writing crappy spaghetti code.