PHP is that weird beast that no one wants to praise and yet it works tremendously well for those who manage to tame it.

I would likely never touch it as there are too many languages to use and what I know is more than enough to do my job, but I am super excited to see languages like PHP that aren't mainstream in my bubble to keep evolving

I'll gladly praise it. It's a very practical language with good tooling and excellent amounts of libraries and scripts available. Performance is decent, development speed for tools, toys and prototypes is extreme.

The standard library has a lot of good stuff for calling API:s, handling JSON, shelling out, string juggling and HTML publishing on a socket. In every typical install you also have common database interfaces. I've done so much problem solving at breathtaking speed in single file PHP scripts and PsySH over the years.

The threading story isn't or wasn't very good so typically I've done logic in PHP and then driven it from something like a Scheme, Picolisp or Elixir when I've needed it.

I'm not tempting you do to it or anything, but I want to say given your point of view, if one day you need a crude+ app and try to do it using laravel, you might be really surprised by what modern php actually is.

There was a point were I thought the language and it ecosystem was going down the drain but then they recovered and modern php is 90% what do you want to do and don't worry about the how, it's easy.

I don't use it much anymore, but every time I do all I see are possibilities.