PHP 8 is a joy to use and the ecosystem is insane: there are few web frameworks as good as Symfony out there... Django or Rails don't match Symfony.
Some php devs prefer laravel but I personally don't like when there's too much magic.
My point is that in the industry, very few teams use php without Symfony or Laravel's tools. They also mostly use things like static code analysis tools to catch edgy errors.
Some will argue that if those tools are needed then the language is bad... Maybe, but I don't know any language that would make me more productive than PHP and Symfony for doing SOLID server-side programming, not even nodejs.
Slack dev team wrote a great article about why they they came back to PHP for their server side stuff.
PHP is good at what it does: web oriented OOP.
PHP 8 is a joy to use and the ecosystem is insane: there are few web frameworks as good as Symfony out there... Django or Rails don't match Symfony.
Some php devs prefer laravel but I personally don't like when there's too much magic.
My point is that in the industry, very few teams use php without Symfony or Laravel's tools. They also mostly use things like static code analysis tools to catch edgy errors.
Some will argue that if those tools are needed then the language is bad... Maybe, but I don't know any language that would make me more productive than PHP and Symfony for doing SOLID server-side programming, not even nodejs.
Slack dev team wrote a great article about why they they came back to PHP for their server side stuff.
slack.engineering/taking-php-serio...