Everyone's at a different step in their journey. But I do agree if you're building stuff then exactly, who cares? End of the day it's definitely about what's built, not how.
HN does a lot of stuff well, but there is a ton of gate keeping here and PHP is one part of it. It does not deserve the hate it gets, it's popular to hate PHP here. It's actually less popular to like PHP. So articles like the above always get torn up.
It's rather sad to see, we should be encouraging people to build however they want. Point students in the direction of best practices and discuss ways to improve. Rather than talk about how much we hate the fact that PHP continues to be in the top 10 and pretty much the entire web is built with it.
