I used to hate PHP with passion myself (having read those articles too) before I had to take on a large project which used modern practices (PHP 7+, latest Symfony) and I can say it's been a surprisingly smooth sailing so far, most of the time you use nicely designed abstractions over the core APIs provided by the framework (or its modules) and don't use built-in functions directly. The actual annoyances I notice everyday are things like inconsistent argument order in array_* functions (people prefer to use them directly), but you quickly get used to it and there's not that many of such functions in day-to-day work. What you usually do is generic stuff like defining models, writing controllers etc. and most of the time it doesn't feel much different from other enterprisey languages I've used such as C# or Java. From time to time you have to use some arcane PHP function because the framework doesn't provide it for you but there's a custom, at our company at least, to wrap such functions in nice utility classes once and forget they exist.
