[smoldesu]

It could very well be that PHP is easier to distribute, and gets used in lots of groupware/industry-standard software that's deployed thousands of times across thousands of organizations. I'd imagine that kind of market share piles up after a while.

[api]

This is exactly it. Lower friction wins. You can just upload PHP scripts and go, while almost everything else requires many more installation steps or even monstrosities like Kubernetes.

[heurisko]

Modern PHP application development doesn't really use the "deploy PHP scripts to a folder" model any more.

The more likely scenario is that a framework with a front controller is used, which is invoked by php-fpm, proxied by nginx.

It's easy enough to do, though.

[lowercased]

The bulk of what I do is still, essentially, 'deploy to a folder'. There's some build steps, and a symlink swap from old to new, but that's still what it's doing. And I can still go edit a single file in a folder some place if I need to test/debug something. That's rare, but there are times when production is the only place an issue shows up (or... the only place you can replicate it - usually you can figure out enough from that to replicate locally later).