PHP applications are extremely easy to install and keep running, and Phabricator is probably the cream of the crop in terms of code quality. The devs have done an incredible job with it.
So the answer is "it can be" considered a positive thing.
You can write clean code in any language, and I've written some nice PHP, but the language itself has many fundamental design problems. For example, printf shouldn't have side-effects on a datetime object:
I run some OSS stuff on PHP, but in containers to keep it all isolated. Although things have gotten better with PHP7, knowing what I know about the language makes me hesitant to use it on any new project for anything except the most trivial systems.
That should definetly be fixed, but it's not something people will ever experience unless they try to write broken code by using undocumented features/sideeffects.
What exactly is it you know about the language that makes you hesitant to use it?
It's type system and automatic casting/comparing is a nightmare.
Although there are namespaces now, the idea of everything being in the global scope was insane (and still even with namespaces, much is still in the global scope).
mysql_real_escape_string
There are no type-safe comparisons for greater or less then (You have ===, but no <== or >==).
What?! Holy shit. Is that considered a positive thing these days?! I must be quite out of the damn loop.