There is javascript for progressive enhancement on some pages. E.g. submitting comments on tickets by pressing Ctrl+Enter, or selection of ranges of lines in git blob view.
I've been contributing to [sr.ht](https://meta.sr.ht/) for a while, which is a commercial project but fully open source, so any work I put in is beneficial to others. Additionally, Drew (owner/author) has proven himself a prolific open source contributor so I have no problem in donating some of my time to his projects since I know it will all be paid back via his work on this and other projects.
The project is still pretty young so it's easy to jump in and add some polish or implement new features you'd like to have.
IMO, jQuery is still very usable for all the "almost static" web sites out there. Sure there are smaller and arguably better options out there, but there's no harm in using it if you're used to it.
I don't see why it being old is an inherent problem.
5.3 and 5.4 had significant performance increases. 5.5 has integrated opcode cache. IMO, PHP has one of the best documentations of any programming language. Many bad bits have been deprecated in recent versions and there are PSR recommendations which make it easier to write decent interoperable code. PHP is growing up.
However, if you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to use it. Just walk away.
I don't agree with you. I'm a developer and I can't design.
After designing many frontends I have come to this conclusion. I'm just not good at it. It takes me ages to get anything done, I have very little original ideas of how to make a page more functional, or even pretty. I can recognise a good design, but I just can't seem to produce it no matter how hard I try, or how long I try for.
Also, doing frontend design just seems to make me miserable. Much happier coding the backend where I'm good and paying a frontend person who does good work there.
Looking at the wall of (f|s)ame, there's still some vital projects without py3 support: south, fabric, mysql-python. Don't see myself developing without those.
I work as a developer at a stock exchange. My department wrote and maintains several business apps in PHP, including a report generation framework and several realtime clinet/server apps.
I find it reliable, reasonably powerful and easy to use. It's major strength is brilliant documentation on the official web site (this is a major downside to Python in my experience).