Admittedly, I've shied away from PHP projects over the past 4-5 years in favor of Python (Django) or server-side JS.
I do still think the biggest hurdle PHP faces, at least when new devs come to it, is the lack of any one clear "best" framework. As you even mentioned, there are "main frameworks", but none of them is the clear "best" choice when you are approaching the language. In fact many people start building with PHP without a framework. Almost no one would start using Ruby to build a web app without choosing Rails. Similarly, no one would choose straight Python over using Django (waiting to get flamed by the Flask community here ;) ). With PHP, a lot of people choose it to build a "simple" web app, and end up just hacking together a few .php files. That was even more true 5+ years ago, and now there are a lot of legacy applications out there, that have grown quite large, still built on that principle.
I do still think the biggest hurdle PHP faces, at least when new devs come to it, is the lack of any one clear "best" framework. As you even mentioned, there are "main frameworks", but none of them is the clear "best" choice when you are approaching the language. In fact many people start building with PHP without a framework. Almost no one would start using Ruby to build a web app without choosing Rails. Similarly, no one would choose straight Python over using Django (waiting to get flamed by the Flask community here ;) ). With PHP, a lot of people choose it to build a "simple" web app, and end up just hacking together a few .php files. That was even more true 5+ years ago, and now there are a lot of legacy applications out there, that have grown quite large, still built on that principle.