1. WordPress was released in 2003, Netscape Navigator was basically dead by then.
2. It’s fair to judge a language by its dominant platform / use case. Rails (2004) and Django (2005) are barely younger than WordPress. Is it fair to judge Ruby and (one facet of) Python by examining Rails and Django respectively? Yes.
According to some statistics [0], Wordpress is used on 41% websites in the world. That’s a lot of websites! Even if those numbers are inflated, It is still likely the most popular PHP app in the world. It is not disingenuous to judge a language by its most popular application.
I wonder what fraction of PHP programmers today mostly work with Wordpress.. and how many PHP jobs involve maintaining Wordpress apps.
Using WordPress as an example for the state of PHP is disingenuous.