I was just talking about with a student who got on to a PHP project with an older developer lead. We decided that PHP is a code smell for a poorly managed project. You know, the kind that were common in the early aughts that featured poor version control practices, no tests, no automation, live changes, live database schema, etc., etc. That's certainly not the way things have to be, but it's never surprising if it is. The root cause is the developer in charge and their reports, but PHP usage is an easy marker to check. We found most examples using other languages (you mention) to be generally better managed in our area/sampling.