PHP as a language? Definitely getting better but still not great. Doesn't support async, the stdlib is awful, data structures are quite rudimentary (no tuple, no list, no map, just a weird array type mixing maps and lists), the old extension system sucks.
But the ecosystem? Damn. I see many people here saying that Typescript is definitely the mature choice for the backend. Honestly, I wanted to believe it, but I disagree. The level of productivity with Laravel is absolutely insane. You have everything you need out of the box and you can launch something so fast it's almost unreal.
Typescript doesn't have that. Maybe it's because of a different mentality in this ecosystem (you should build your blocks yourself), but nothing comes close. The closest would be Adonisjs but it doesn't seem to gain traction.
You don't choose a language to build your web project. You choose a stack. A framework. I definitely prefer python but Django has way less features than Laravel and I don't really enjoy using it. Typescript on the backend was a thing I wanted to believe in (because sharing types between the front and back is a great idea), but I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel, or at least choose 20 different wheels to do something quite simple.
Is Ruby such a great language, or do people just love being productive with Rails? It seems to me that the usage of Ruby without Rails is quite low (I could be wrong).
People choose and stick with stacks, not just languages. And I couldn't find something equivalent to Laravel elsewhere. Give me an equally productive stack and I'll happily drop PHP.