I won't entirely disagree with you on this, because there is still a ton of that code out there, but PHP has had true 'query builders' for a while now, and the mysql_ functions are being deprecated anyway.
One thing I learned from NodeJS is that the quality of the community around a language can matter more than the language. JavaScript is a crap language, but the NodeJS community and the base of available modules is just so good that it makes up for a lot of the language's faults. When I tried it out I thought "who says you can't polish a turd?" I mean... Joyent and Node's community have buffed that thing down to gleaming crystal.
In counterpoint -- Java's actually a pretty good language, but its community's addiction to criminal overengineering is a big reason it hasn't been "sexy" in some time.
There are a ton of features in modern PHP which address a lot of the common criticisms brought against it. Doing a proper comparison with other languages (framework to framework, not framework to language) I think PHP measures up reasonably well.
But there is so much terrible, legacy code out there. The evolution, if it's happening is happening very slowly.
It almost makes you wonder if the point isn't to keep catering to bad programmers' whims just to keep from losing the 50% of PHP's community that would never be able to write software at all if they weren't working in a language that enabled them to ignore every best practice from the past 20 years.
I kid, I kid. Mostly.