I don't hate the programming language. PHP is a great language that I used for a decade before moving over to the frontend. I don't use it any more but I work in a company that does and I see good results when it's deployed. This is not about PHP (or Python, or Ruby, as they also have built-in httpd servers).

What I hate is the idea of putting something on a server that's going to make my life harder, or create more work for my team. I don't want the developers I work with having to give up their evenings or weekends to resolve issues and incidents that arose from things shouldn't have existed in the first place. That's why I don't want additional network services sneaking their way on to production. I should very easily be able to tell which applications on a server are listening to external traffic.

Maintaining good security is hard enough without language runtimes including things that should strictly only ever be a development dependency rather than a production dependency.

If there are pills I can take to make this problem go away, sign me up.