[megous]

There are plenty of custom PHP websites and devs that write them. I, too, still write fully custom (no framework) PHP webapps for customers where I don't expect to be babysitting the app after it's written, and where websockets and real-time interactivity is not necessary.

PHP is great fit for that, because all dependencies are part of the system updates in that case.

[goldcd]

Yes - I wrote a messageboard in PHP 18 years ago whilst clutching an OReilly book in my hand. It's definitely not well coded, but it works. It's moved servers many times, changed OS, Webserver - and it's now running on my NAS. I've maybe twice had to spend an afternoon tightening it up due to some PHP change - but broadly been maintenance/issue free.

For at least the last decade I've been pondering re-implementing it in some fancy new language - but as it just keeps working, it slides down the priority list.

[taylodl]

That's the "secret" of PHP. It's 20 years later and it just works. Many other front-end development tools and frameworks have come and gone in that timeframe yet PHP persists. Why? Well, I'm not a PHP expert but it sounds like they care about backwards compatibility. You don't have to continually reimplement everything all the time, which both costs money and discourages further investment. There are reasons COBOL is still around 50+ years later.