For me the best platform is one that's easy to debug and the debugging story for php is one of the worst. Otherwise it would still be quite hard to read. But at least it's cheap to host.
it has orders of magnitude less complexity than the JVM, or even the various Python server runtimes (gunicorn, uwsgi, etc)
at least in my experience. can you elaborate on what you see as the debug support deficiencies of PHP?
I can set breakpoints in my react app too, but it feels weird to inspect code in the browser console. And since modern frameworks get compiled for the browser, it is all even less familiar at a glance.