Every language has foot-guns of some sort. The difference is how easy it is to accidentally pull the trigger.

PHP makes it easy.

Yeah of course PHP isn't the only programming language you can write bugs in. I don't think you can make it impossible to shoot yourself in the foot, but PHP gives you more opportunities than some other languages, especially with older PHP standard library functions.

One thing I particularly hate is when functions require calling another function afterwards to get any errors that happened, like `json_decode`. C has that problem too.

Problems don't make it a _bad_ programming language. All languages have problems. PHP just has more than some other languages.