I'm not saying its fake, it is very real. It's a de facto web language. You have Wordpress, MediaWiki, Facebook heavily invested in it.
It does not make PHP a well designed and thought through language. It was a hack that could do the job, and was readily available. We are talking about a language having calls like mysql_escape_string and mysql_real_escape_string(yes I'm aware it is deprecated) it is one big spaghetti mess!
But as a PHP developer, you will always have work. I'm just not willing to perpetuate this #@$! anymore.