Not sure what qualifies as ugly but I find PHP codes much easier to read than JavaScript (if that is what you meant)

If with weak you mean weak typed then you're partially correct: most of it can be typed and ever since .. I dunno, years ago, I've worked exclusively with strict typing. Things have improved considerably on that front

What part is verbose? Genuine curiosity

The inconsistencies are true. It's also PHP's strength that they kept everything like that and kept everything compatible. Every JavaScript framework I have worked with caused the weekly update nightmare headaches where 5 bugs were resolved, but now 10 more were added due to changing method calls. I hated it and I love PHP for at least keeping that consistency. Over time they have worked little by little to mitigate things but at the core, yes, you have function call inconsistencies. However, good editors these days for that for you and tell you the function name and give you the parameter order.

Then that there are few good things you can dowithout frameworks is nonsense.

If you want to do it right you use a framework, but that goes for every language. But I've sen and worked on (admittedly a horrible) system that would scrape millions of pages per day and its first version was just hacked together code. Ugly but super quick and simple, no frameworks. I've built many similar systems and sites like it over the years.

Now I recently built my own new framework in PHP, all strict, and it's just fast and beautiful