This is just bizarre, I can’t see a sane codebase where this would be preferable to going on GitHub and pressing “.”
As opposed to which web development ecosystem exactly? The only web development ecosystem with overall decent quality software that I could come up with is Java, and their understanding of quality is... enterprise-y.
Give me a mature PHP framework over a NPM dependency tree, python web framework, or ruby on rails any day. At least when looking for 'quality'. Relatively.
PHP is a very modern and mature language at this point. If the first thing you think of is Wordpress, then you’re behind.
I don't understand your criticism and I suggest you might not either.
Edit: this reminds me, I was like this too at the beginning of my dev career, I also was completely in favor of this supposed “simplicity” of php, only much later, thanks to hickey’s nice talk I realized that I was confusing simplicity with ease.
Are you suggesting that it is bad that PHP applications often have a request path that relates to the folder structure?
In other words, are you suggesting that simplicity means an application should not have a request path that relates to the folder structure?
To give an example, are you saying it's a bad thing that example.com/profile/ loads /profile/index.php, rather than passing /profile through a single controller function to identify what code should be responsible for handling it?
The first approach actually seems pretty straightforward paradigm and it's what most new programmers would expect. Adopting a MVC/routes method is more complex and arguably overkill for a simple application.
If that is what you are contending, it should be said that PHP does not require this approach. Although it is often a preferred approach, because it doesn't depend on additional web server configuration.
Also, let's not lose sight that this arises in a context of criticism of the model adopted for programming a simple form. This is just a simple one page form. More complex or abstract paradigms or design patterns is overkill.
The next on the line is that PHP doesn’t even need anything like version control because you can just copy files over SFTP.
PS: if your project is simple enough to fit in a single file I would argue that most of the time you may use absolutely anything (including a Google Sheet) and you would be equally happy with the results.