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> The vast majority of projects will never have to scale to billions of users, so hyperscalability is not a huge concern.

I would have thought PHP would scale very well. It may not be high performance, but its start each request-response cycle from scratch should scale horizontally very well, surely?

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It does. But scaling to billions of users (or billions of requests per day) is still not easy and you really need high performance for that. Laravel scales to a certain point, where their design decisions (eloquent, the queuing system etc.) are still working.

That said, with today's PHP it is possible to optimize the hot path pretty well with stuff like FFI.

Correct, the real bottleneck is almost always the database.

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