[rollcat]

That's my entire point: the increase in complexity is very non-linear. With Python, Go, or whatever else, you pay a slightly higher upfront price, and you get things like atomic deployments out of the box; that price is however almost immediately amortised by the de-facto requirement to set up HTTPS/ACME, etc.

With PHP it's easier to just get started, but you've already mentioned versions, symlinks, CI, etc - that's the non-linear increase in complexity, you have to add a lot more pieces to get good ROI. With Python or Go you can continue using SCP to deploy for as long as it suits your needs, because no code changes will be picked up until you restart the process. If you need rollbacks, e.g. Go doesn't need symlinks or versioned directories - the entire app is a single executable, so you can just keep copies of these. You pay for what you use, and the returns are more linear and immediate.

If you only have experience deploying PHP, I would sincerely recommend trying other languages/runtimes/frameworks, even if for no other reason than to learn from what the rest of the world is doing. For me, learning to deploy PHP correctly was also a horizon-broadening experience.