while i have not profiled it myself, i've certainly experienced how slow it can be with deep dependency graphs stemming from a few, common top level "require"s. i dont want its slowness to be equated to poor PHP perf in general or something equally unwarranted.
That article is just more of the usual bullshit used to bash PHP, maybe to make authors like himself feel better about not using it, and have a good laugh with other bitter peers. Haters gonna hate.
The author is comparing Composer to Bundler, which makes no sense because Composer does a lot more than Bundler. With Composer you can do things exactly the way you want. He says "I don't know what it does under the hood, if it clones every single repository of every required package independently of it being necessary", proving that he didn't even bother learning how to use the tool.
There is no way you can live with Bundler after having used Composer. Trust me, I was a Rails guy.
Well I only cared about Composer and all his points were wrong.
I'm not here to get into another PHP debate. Non-phpers can waste all their time hating if they want, and then go fight with all the problems they have with outdated components like Bundler, create hacks to simulate features that are native in PHP and other OOP languages (eg: interfaces in ruby, abstract classes in python), etc. I'll just get things done in a professional manner using what seems to be the best web platform of our time and then enjoy life.
I've also created a PHP Project Template (https://github.com/tedivm/PhpProjectTemplate) that includes things like composer, unit test configuration, travis-ci and coveralls integration, and various other things that people can use to bootstrap their modern php project.
I'd like to look at a good example to give it another chance.