[tomnipotent]

Composer shored up package management. Laravel and Symfony offer robust framework ecosystems. PHP 7 bridged the performance gap with HHVM. Libraries for a wide-range of critical infrastructure services from databases (Postgres, MySQL, Elasticache, Redis) to messaging systems (AMQP, Kafka, ) to monitoring and observability (New Relic/DataDog, Prometheus, Sentry). Cloud support is ubiquitous.

Even the top packages are pedestrian things like logging, event dispatching, sub-process management, and testing.

But PHP has a Microsoft-level of baggage, and those bridges can't be unburned.