Fair enough as well, but the internet seems full of people who’ve used php decades ago, and spread falsehoods based on that as fact. Your REPL complaint specifically is void these days - you can do exactly the same with a php interpreter, there’s kernels for Jupyter, tracebacks, repl locally and in any production environment (readline is baked in).
It’s incredibly frustrating to see people discuss the language without any actual knowledge of it. Modern php involves one of the most stable package managers of any language, an extremely fast runtime with a JIT compiler and opcode cache, asynchronous code and coroutines (well, native green threads at least, but proper coroutines via an extension), mature frameworks, stateful application servers, solid standards among frameworks, containerised stacks,… it’s a joy to work with, yet people complain about standard library function names and form handling in templates from 1999.