My position is: PHP is excellent, and has been excellent for a very long time.
Open, easy and accessible to not just learn and read but tinker with, it's not a ridiculous quasi-proprietary labor-arbitrage exercise disguised as a toolchain that you need a contraption of a CI/CD pipeline to deploy and it works.
There might be better choices for professionals with green-field pro needs, but "one small, discoverable step up from HTML you can deploy right out of your VCS or editor"... that's a lot.