There are almost no "X killed my startup posts" at all. Indeed, there are very few "killed my startup posts" of any kind. So that means nothing about PHP. It means that people don't see a lot of benefit in publicly advertising failure and then flagellating themselves for their own choice of tools. People don't do that, they just quietly switch.

People do hear about the problems with PHP, when they are mentioned. It's good to have specifics available rather than just delivering some general subjective statement, which is why we get one article after another highlighting various screwups in the project itself.

You can use any Turing complete language to write programs. That sets an upper bound on how difficult it can be to do virtually anything. But this is hardly a defense of PHP. There are also principles of good engineering beyond "write something which seems to work for now in any way possible".