PHP/Laravel is a higher level of abstraction. With Laravel specifically, it's the closest thing I've seen to writing web-app business logic directly in English. Sure, like any abstraction, it comes at a cost. Your applications would be more performant and CS-theoretically-elegant if written in C++ or Elixir/Phoenix. But you would spend a lot more time digging into segfaults, manipulating databases, and writing CRUD form boilerplate, which is far removed from your business logic.

I chose PHP for my recent startup -- despite being less experienced with PHP. The speed of development in Laravel is insane, because most of the framework is focused on making the common features of web apps more convenient. Coupled with static analysis tools and IDE helpers, all of the Laravel magic is actually understood by your IDE (PHPStorm). I've worked with Python and NodeJS for most of my career, and I've never seen this level of dev tooling. My newest project was in Laravel. I was able to ship the whole thing in half of the time it would've taken me in Django or some NodeJS framework, simply because the Laravel "magic" around databases, forms, CRUD, IDE helpers, ORM and scheduling and task queues is so fantastic.