I’m a full time senior PHP/JS developer.

PHP has a bad rap because of a few factors.

1, as you said, it’s accessible. It’s a very easy language to learn with a simple syntax and a simple tool chain. So often, it’s a dev’s first language. PHP holds your hand a little bit, but for the most part, security is on the developer, and when a dev doesn’t know any better, bad practices like interpolating values directly into your sql query seem like an easy way to get the job done, but at the hidden cost of opening up SQL injection vulnerabilities. But I’ve seen the same thing happen in Python code, so that’s not really a PHP problem so much as an education problem.

2, earlier versions of PHP were, in a word, shit. They were rife with inconsistencies, poor structure, half-baked features, and it all ran like dogshit. Even today, there’s still some contention in the PHP world about whether to fix the inconsistencies or not, because so much legacy code would fall apart if they did. PHP <= 4 was a goddamned dumpster fire. 5 was MARGINALLY better and brought in proper OOP. 6 literally didn’t exist for various reasons. 7 was actually getting pretty good, now with optional static typing. 8 is BANGIN’. It’s fast, easy to work with, has a great feature set, and a huge community.

3, it’s a big player. When you’re a huge player, you’re also a huge target. Wordpress is one of the most prolific web apps in existence, and it’s PHP based. Being huge, many more people are writing (shit) code for it, and many more (shit) people are trying to break it. Of course software that’s run on more servers is gonna be attacked more. It’s just numbers.

TBH, today, working in both languages extensively, I’d gladly take a PHP based web app over a NodeJS based web app. Don’t get me wrong, I love node for what it is and the paycheck I get, but JS is a goddamned dumpster fire of a half-baked language.

So tldr, don’t fear the PHP. As long as your software was written by somebody who knows their aaS from a hole in the ground, you’ll be fine.