It's not just papering over cracks, though. (There's a bit of that, but they do try to avoid it)
It's a slow, deliberative process to properly fix the most widely deployed server-side web programming language. It's not going to be easy, and it is being done by fairly wise heads.
Many of the points in the decade-old article still stand, but the ecosystem around PHP has papered over a lot of the cracks in a variety of ways.