I think the main reason I still prefer PHP after doing web development for over a decade is not its syntax but its set-up.
Picture me, often the only programmer, supporting several-dozen business web apps. Each app is in its own directory. To add a route, I just make a new PHP file. This eases mingling other, static, files in that same directory: CSS, JS, HTML, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, images, and videos that the users wanted to supplement the app with. Maintaining a list of routes in some other file would complicate things, especially with the number and complexity of the apps that we have. (User-uploaded files are stored elsewhere.)
That is really a feature of CGI, and FastCGI, not PHP. But I like PHP more than Perl, and I'm not sure how well the FastCGI frameworks for other languages are written. For example, I often dream of using JavaScript in FastCGI.
But then again I am also spoiled by the extent of PHP's standard library. It's mainly a bunch of functions in the global namespace, but an alphabetic namespace is vast, and there have been just a handful of times that I wanted to make a function whose name was already taken.
PHP is also stable. I've never had a problem with a script bringing down other parts of the website or even other parts of the same app (except that one time when a coworker wrote a PHP script that built SQL dynamically and did it in a bad way, and used up all the RAM on the server).
PHP has been fast for me, even back in 2005. Then again I don't use third-party frameworks. I have written a few helper libraries, to reduce code repetition.
