I used PHP for years since it's quite popular in this part of the world.

For someone like me, "server-side rendering" introduced in JS land (particularly for React projects, but not only them) is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. We had this solved in the 90s and it didn't require converting a client framework into a server one (all while pulling in 2000 dependencies), and a multi-stage build process. Thankfully, the whole IT sphere is large enough now that we can just pretend this kind of stuff doesn't exist and avoid companies that use it.