So php tries so hard to be Java. Well, just stick with Spring and get the job done professionally. Learning PHP these days is a waste of time.
I'll give the example of an internal system I develop for an IT company. Technically, it could be written in whatever, but they explicitly wanted PHP, as do a great many businesses. Why? Because PHP is after plain HTML the absolute simplest to make a server for and if you want to host it externally, it's still simple and really cheap.
There is plenty of demand for PHP for other reasons, and these days, most of these codebases won't even be horrible spaghetti
It has somewhat improved with Spring Boot, but still to be avoided.
Database layer in Spring, especially if you combine it with the monstrosity called Hibernate, is enough to apply to an insane asylum. Trying to debug what combinations of annotations that work and doesn't work is time you could have used writing PHP instead and get results.
The idea that you can annotate a SQL schema & query language into a Java class with annotations is one of the most asinine ideas I ever come across.
And don't get me started on Java collections.
C#, TypeScript, Go, PHP -- they all converge on the same methods, tools and workflows. Tech choice these days is about what you want to have on your resume.
At first we had guilds and craftsmen. We could only produce a few things, their quality was quite low and the products were expensive. This was one of the reasons quality of life was quite bad, actually.
Then we created the assembly line, standardized parts, mass production. Life sucked for the assembly line worker, but everyone else benefited. From a certain point of view even the assembly line worker benefited.
Hand crafting doesn't scale. 1 brilliant coder with in the Lisp Ivory Tower won't ever be able to reproduced the output of 100 decent covers in the Java Middleware Shop. It stands to reason, those decent coders can use their brains and time to test more, implement more kinds of features, talk to customers, colleagues, bosses, maybe even promote their product and do all sorts of things human beings do when they want something (coding is only a minor part of creating a successful product).
Two heads are better than one. And 100 heads that are not at loggerheads are better than two.
But I quite disagree with the "it made our lives better" point, and would say that the efficiency, even with all the standardized language outlook, tooling and methodology is closer to the "9 women getting a baby in 1 month" quip than to Ford's assembly lines.
The part about our life being better is non negotiable, you haven't had to hand wash clothes if you're saying otherwise.
And that's just one example, refrigeration, mass mobility... Life is incomparably better and saying otherwise is just ignoring reality, in my book ;-)
The (popular) horrors that are Symfony, Laravel, Doctrine and co were all inspired by Java Web frameworks and ORM.
I just bored of the hating on PHP when it continues to fit the web so well and some enormous percentage of sites are built in PHP.