I'm quite surprised that the article doesn't mention Laravel.
PHP as a language? Definitely getting better but still not great. Doesn't support async, the stdlib is awful, data structures are quite rudimentary (no tuple, no list, no map, just a weird array type mixing maps and lists), the old extension system sucks.
But the ecosystem? Damn. I see many people here saying that Typescript is definitely the mature choice for the backend. Honestly, I wanted to believe it, but I disagree. The level of productivity with Laravel is absolutely insane. You have everything you need out of the box and you can launch something so fast it's almost unreal.
Typescript doesn't have that. Maybe it's because of a different mentality in this ecosystem (you should build your blocks yourself), but nothing comes close. The closest would be Adonisjs but it doesn't seem to gain traction.
You don't choose a language to build your web project. You choose a stack. A framework. I definitely prefer python but Django has way less features than Laravel and I don't really enjoy using it. Typescript on the backend was a thing I wanted to believe in (because sharing types between the front and back is a great idea), but I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel, or at least choose 20 different wheels to do something quite simple.
Is Ruby such a great language, or do people just love being productive with Rails? It seems to me that the usage of Ruby without Rails is quite low (I could be wrong).
People choose and stick with stacks, not just languages. And I couldn't find something equivalent to Laravel elsewhere. Give me an equally productive stack and I'll happily drop PHP.
My day-to-day work now is mostly Python and Vue, but PHP was my bread and butter for almost 20 years and to this day probably still probably one of my favorite languages just because I am still so familiar with it. There's something to be said for knowing all the traps and rough spots, and knowing how to avoid them.
The things that held PHP up in the early days, especially it being just dead simple to deploy, are not as big a deal in 2025 as they were in 2005. Shared hosting, while it still definitely exists, is kind of a dying model. Most modern dev I see these days even in PHP is nginx/PHP-FPM and containers, which is really not that terribly different from any other web framework. Even Wordpress, these days I recommend anyone who truly wants to go down that path to find a hosted Wordpress provider rather than trying to do it themselves.
Personally? I would never start a greenfield project now using just PHP. I don't know many people who would.
But PHP + Composer + Laravel? Laravel did for PHP what Rails did for Ruby, and what React/Vue/etc did for JS. Composer gave PHP real package management. It cannot be understated how important it was to have a framework and package manager to take care of all of the thoroughly unpleasant parts. That way you can focus on building the app, not reimplementing things you've done so many time before.