No, my argument is that most of the footguns described in A Fractal of Bad Design have been long since fixed and those that remain are being removed as and when

No, my argument is that most of the footguns described in A Fractal of Bad Design have been long since fixed and those that remain are being removed as and when it's feasible and the PHP community has matured a great deal to the point where the remaining footguns don't really apply in modern codebases because of libraries, static analysis and testing. Spend any amount of time actually using PHP and you'd discover that it is meaningfully different to what it once was. It's far from perfect, and still has a long way to go, but if you reflect on where it was and what had to change to get where it is today, the improvement and progress has been excellent.