The good thing in PHP that I don't think enough people talk about is Laravel.
If you are starting a new PHP web app and you expect to grow beyond a toy project, I highly recommend starting by using the Laravel framework. Laravel provides so many useful things and it encourages good separation of concerns and code organization. But it is flexible enough to get out of your way if you need it to.
I don't think Laravel is a good example. It uses a lot of global state and static method calls. It copied all bad things that were there in Ruby on Rails.
If you look at any code example here [1] you will see that global variables are used everywhere.
Using global variables in a careless fashion is a bad practice indeed.
But globals are not universally evil. Laravel uses globals very thoughtfully. Having used the Laravel framework for many years, I agree with many of the choices it has made.
If you are starting a new PHP web app and you expect to grow beyond a toy project, I highly recommend starting by using the Laravel framework. Laravel provides so many useful things and it encourages good separation of concerns and code organization. But it is flexible enough to get out of your way if you need it to.