I think the OP has a fair point. I could be way off but I feel few developer get excited about working on PHP projects. I jumped ship to Node.js around PHP 5 and haven't enjoyed working on PHP code bases ever since. I think this in part could be due to TypeScript, giving much more confidence in refactoring and moving a project forward. The massive npm module ecosystem is probably also a major factor. The fact that WordPress and Facebook use PHP is more historic then being exemplary for it being an excellent solution.