My point is that calling PHP an awful mess, besides being unproductive and (IMO) not true, is that from their perspective, it is putting them down. Even from my perspective, after a long career writing in many languages, PHP is far from an awful mess, and it pays my pretty decent principal engineer salary.
I think that not wanting to see things from that perspective closes you off from becoming a better programmer.
If you're a new developer who happens to be focusing on PHP, seeing senior folks criticizing PHP as a language should make you question why they're doing that, and research their claims to see if they have merit. Some will and some won't. Taking someone's Twitter rant against some of the specific oddities of PHP as an assault on you personally seems like an opportunity for personal growth we should be encouraging, and not turn to coddling people like they're children. And the same could be said for JS on the front end, JS on the backend, C or C++ or Rust or Java or any number of languages.
Approaching others' criticisms with an open mind and trying to disprove them will make you better than trying to hamfist it into a claim of gatekeeping where there is none.
I have plenty of criticism of PHP, and I address the fact that valid criticism is essential in the third section.
Blindly saying that PHP is a hot mess, in a public setting, is detrimental to I think the community at large. PHP is but one of the many tools I’ve been using, my heart is with Common Lisp, but I’ve really enjoyed Java, golang, C++, Typescript and now rust. Nothing binds me to PHP except I get a tremendous amount of stuff done with it.
I have plenty of hot takes on technology, and love to use strong language when I rant amongst friends. If anything, I am really not attached to any one of them, there is good and bad everywhere, and many decisions have nothing to do with technical merits at all.
There is a difference between constructive criticism and calling a language "awful mess". PHP is fine for many use cases and I cannot take a "senior folk" seriously if they plain old trash a language without providing constructive criticism which any language warrants including PHP.
So the point is that PHP is no different than say Go or JS or Java. They all have their pros and cons.
I'd be willing to explore the possibility that PHP isn't as bad as I think it is. I'll wholeheartedly agree that putting down anyone who uses PHP is bad.
My objection is that you're declaring that people who attack a language are actually attacking its users, which makes them bullies, which means you should ignore them. I think you're taking things far too personally and using it as a reason to dismiss criticism.
I think that not wanting to see things from that perspective closes you off from becoming a better programmer.