Every few months someone tells me PHP is dead. I nod politely, then go ship something in it.
The ecosystem won me over
Laravel alone gives you auth, queues, migrations, mail, scheduling, caching, and a clean structure - all on day one. I don't reinvent the login form. I don't wire up an ORM from scratch. I spend my time on the part that's actually unique to the project. That's the real productivity win, and it compounds fast.
To the skeptics
I get it - PHP has baggage. But most of that baggage is 15 years old. If you haven't touched modern PHP with strict types, readonly properties, and enums, you're arguing against something that no longer exists. Try it without the old mental model. You might be surprised.
The honest downsides
Async is still awkward. PHP wasn't built with an event loop in mind, and solutions like Swoole or Laravel Octane work - but they feel bolted on. If your app is doing heavy real-time work, you'll feel the friction. The type system is also catching up rather than leading; generics are still missing. These are real gaps, not things I'd talk you out of caring about.
But for the kind of work I do - web apps, APIs, dashboards, pipelines - PHP ships. Fast, reliably, and with a community that's been solving the same problems for decades.
(psst - try the Konami code anywhere on this site.)