PHP is far from “least bad language”. Nowadays it is an ok language, one of many. You can also write ok code in it. The main issue is that it’s really easy to write horrible shit that just barely works and will break when you look at it wrong. In fact without a lot of knowledge and experience that is the code you will probably write.

There are much better languages for any webdev niche you can think off, and some that are just better for webdev overall (e.g. Elixir). The reason PHP is still relevant is mostly huge legacy codebases that require a lot of engineering power to maintain (because PHP is not a good language for maintenance).

The way I look at it is that PHP is the C++ of webdev (but slightly worse).