> proper closures

That link is laughable. Author angrily tries to persuade me (the reader) that "PHP doesn't have closures!" while essentially showcasing multiple ways to use them to do everything (and a bit more) that you could with a JS closure. It could be argued that PHP implementation of those is actually better that in JS, since you actually have a choice if you want outer scope variable to be mutable or not and default to the safe option (immutable), but allows you to use reference if you want it to be mutable. It all boils down to the definition of the word "closure", at which point I'm: okay man, PHP doesn't have closures, I won't argue. Now please show me actually important use case where it prevents you from doing FP, because I can list way better reasons why PHP closures are fucked up in my opinion than that.

> generics missing

True. I hope they'll add them eventually. It's not like PHP competition has (or had until very recently), though. And more generally with types: still not there and, furthermore, some relatively recent additions that could fix things, actually are fucked up.

> OOP, but that is terrible in PHP as well

I don't like how people currently tend to use OOP in PHP, because they try to emulate Java, and Java is awful. But actually, its OOP is pretty much fine. The only thing out of my head that actually feels like a problem in this department is absence of polymorphism. Otherwise, especially since traits were added, there isn't too much to complain.

> actually consistent standard library

A myth. Well, TBH, I was often bashing PHP for that as well (and often sardonically joke about that still), but, honestly, the more experience you have, the better you know that, sadly, every PL is fucked up in this regard. In practice, it's not a big problem though. Half of that is handled for you by the IDE, some I solved for myself by basically writing my own "underscore.js" in PHP with a consistent interface. Anyway, these are coder pet peeves, not real technical indications for or against the language (as opposed to real reasons why PHP sucks: i.e. no async/await, parallelism, lots of broken low-level stuff, etc).

> hundreds of PHP open tags

> which you can see in many popular open source PHP projects

This is a strawman. You use people that apparently are not skillful programmers and use the result of them using the language to demonstrate that the language is bad. I mean, Wordepress probably can be used as a demonstration of "success of PHP in the real word", but, personally, I would never use Wordpress, and its plugins are probably the showcase of the worst programming patterns imaginable. No professional programmer that knows what he's doing uses PHP as a template engine in 2020 except for a quick demo, and the ONLY tag he ever needs is <?php to put in the beginning of every file. So, this is not a problem for an actual programmer, who chooses PHP as a language for his project, because, surprisingly, every alternative just sucks.

> any language, that has ...

Uhm, Rust? I'm not sure I'm familiar with that language, because this "any" language you describe surely isn't Python, JS, Java, C++, Go and pretty much everything else people actually use in production. And I wouldn't use Rust for a generic backend for a generic enterprise, at least not yet.