Big fan and longtime user of PHP here. Personal code has been providing business value with hardly any changes for 10 years. What has burned me recently is BoltCMS 3 using lots of symfony packages that don't work on PHP 8 anymore. There's a new version of the CMS, but it's a rewrite meaning lots of work to rewrite extensions and customization. Really grateful for the good open source CMS and PHP, but it's hard to sell customers an expensive update that won't give them any visible benefits. Those customers might decide to spend the money to build a new website with somebody else instead. PHP5 and 7 were quite backwards compatible, but sadly PHP8 seems to break a lot. New versions are supported for a much shorter time now.

So while I still like PHP and the good work they are doing, the maintenance cost has sadly steeply risen recently. SLAs are a necessity now.