It gets a lot of hate. But it also drives a whole bunch of large businesses, and a lot of products. Its not trendy, but it gets the work done. In the past there were many bad products made ontop of it, but those products made sales, so were they really all that bad?
Its popular to use it like a punching bag, but the reality is its sigificantly better than the time period where most of the "hate" comes from. A time before javascript.
Its funny, people struggle to hit c10k with modern application stacks, but we had been doing it since before the iPhone.
I quite like it, its quite clean, the tooling isn't painful, and its fairly easy to make applications go fast.
tl;dr its a conservative technical choice, and ergo, unfashionable, but also drives a good portion of the internet.
Disclosure: I write PHP unless I have a good reason not to, I also do some .Net and some Go.