[stunt]

PHP has its special place for every developer that works on web. And it got all recent improvements thanks to all those criticisms. I think every popular language receives criticism and that's just fine.

I'm happy that the language is evolving and there is a strong ecosystem with quality libraries and developers unlike what it used to be 5 years ago.

I've been doing several languages (Scala, and Typescript. also Go recently) in last few years. But, I still follow PHP ecosystem closely and I'd definitely choose it for my next web startup. It's just 10x faster and ultimately cheaper to build web with PHP. That's why there are so many big success stories that started with PHP even in areas that you wouldn't believe. Surprisingly enough, not only web! One of Cloudflare's founders said on an interview that their back-end was written in PHP and it was used for a long time. That's one of the things that you think no one would do.

[tutfbhuf]

A static (serverless) website hosted on something like github pages or S3 paired with some API calls to an nodejs application running on a single core vm instance, both behind cloudflare, is also extremely cheap and should be able to easily beat php in terms of performance/costs ratio.

[stunt]

Yes you are right. There are a few really good frameworks like Gatsby and NEXT for building static websites since last few years. JS/NodeJS/TS development cost is also quite moderate and good.

JS ecosystem still lacks good reliable vendors and that holds some companies away from it. Surprisingly it's holding up really well even though must of the packages are maintained by individual contributors.