I must be very picky, because to this day I still don't like it at all. It sucks less than it used to maybe, but if I compare it to other languages, I still would rather use anything else.
As usual, it really comes down to personal preference. In the past year, I have managed a few things in Wordpress, wrote my own PHP, Flask and node sites; and after all that I would 100 % choose Flask or node over PHP.
Node has the advantage of same language back and front, "asynchronous" execution and having both dynamic typing and static typing with TypeScript. And huge ecosystem obviously helps as well.
Python also has pretty sizeable community and Django is probably a huge reason why a lot of people choose python over anything else. And the syntax, at least to me, feels much less cumbersome than PHP. But I have not tried PHP 8 at all.
I like flask and express, there are simpler than php franeworks like laravel so I can see why one would prefer using them, but django is weird and I could never get used to it. I always felt like there was too much magic.
The problems with PHP aren't really with the concept of dynamic typing as such, but rather with the somewhat curious semantics and really awkward standard library. These are relics from the past that are, unfortunately, very hard to fix without a "Python 3000 moment", and all the problems that brings. Although PHP 8 does fix a bit of it (various comparisons and operators are a bit better now) there's still a lot of it remaining, especially in the standard library IMHO.
They're a bit overblown now I feel, and I wouldn't throw out the language and ecosystem just because a comparator got fussy. You probably won't win any "Code is Art" contests, and if you want to do computer science work then why even waste the time hating PHP, it was never for that. PHP is a web application workhorse, and it's really exceedingly good at that task.
It's not just the comparison that's fussy; if that would be it then that would be fine. It's mostly the really messy, inconsistent, and difficult to use standard library that turns me off personally. And this isn't about inconsistent argument order or naming, I can deal with that as well, but stuff like not being able to create temporary files well, or not being able to check for specific errors in fopen(), and a long list of similar things. These are things that make writing simple, correct, and elegant programs very hard, or sometimes even impossible.
