It's probably some guy/gal who carries a big toolbox full of letters and symbols

You don't have to use PHP so there is no reason to mock it. You just know it is shit and you move on. Unfortunately you __have to__ use javascript sometimes (or always) so there is reason to mock it. That's the reason why people always mock JS. It is omnipresent and you have to touch it with your bare hands.

PHP has been relentlessly mocked for the past decade, there were websites dedicated to making fun of its quirks. Things only started turning around after PHP 7.

Note the date: 2016, almost 10 years ago. When I started doing actual web development in like 2014, I’d been using C++ for a couple of decades and it was somewhat of a surprise to me that JavaScript was a real language, because of the low reputation it had among C++ programmers. I didn’t even know JS had conceptual origins tied to Scheme, or I’d have been interested earlier. I hadn’t been aware how amazingly good the dev tools in the browser I used had become, with a debugger and profiler just sitting there. This was all before promises and React and Yarn. I discovered the C++ programmers were mostly wrong and JS had evolved far beyond the misconceptions many people had about it. I think today most C++ programmers are much more aware that JS is a decent functional language that is quite fast and is omnipresent in all browsers. To be fair, the NPM ecosystem was a dumpster fire in many ways. OTOH, this comedy article is just a huge list of hot takes, and language hate has been a pastime of many a web comic, but the mockery has done almost nothing to stop people from using languages.

I find it interesting that they choose a quirky Unity-based personality. I’ve done C# in a split IBM Mainframe / Microsoft shop so I’m far more inclined to view it as a stodgy suit wearing persona than anything else. All my Java gigs have been flip-flops and t-shirts kind of jobs.