Except PHP + MySQL is still a solid choice for a single developer. It scales out well enough for almost all use cases.

Meh, my stack is laravel hosted on docker containers.

PHP, Redis, MariaDB and a makefile to run docker-compose commands.

Nothing wrong with it tbh, it runs on a VPS

It’s almost 2022 and 95% of all backends are still just CRUD.

PHP has evolved, it less of an injection vulnerability factory now, and MariaDB is the new MySQL. As usual computers became cheaper and more powerful, maybe not as much as we could have hoped in 2010 but SSDs made up for the slow rate of progress in CPUs.

All that to say that PHP + MySQL/MariaDB has evolved will get you much further than it did in 2010 without losing its simplicity. Current trends are backed by tech giants working with millions of servers and billions of users, and they push for technologies that fit their use cases. They goal is not to make a one man shop.