What I miss about PHP is that it was possible to put a file in a folder and use it instantly.

If you want to quickly do something without diving into frameworks the tooling was easy to setup and rarely fell apart, if ever. There are not many moving parts, you usually have a web server that is very solid and comes with an installer that you hit next next next. Then you have a database server, usually MySQL. Sometimes you would need an extension to work with images, you put it in place by editing an .ini file.

Almost like an Excel for backend.