Every year the same discussion pops up. PHP is dead, PHP is outdated, PHP is not a real language. And every year it keeps running the majority of the web.
I have been writing PHP since 2015. Back then it was a different language. PHP 5.6, no type hints to speak of, messy standard library. Fair enough, a lot of the criticism was earned. But PHP 8.4 is a different story. Named arguments, enums, fibers, readonly properties, match expressions. The language has moved fast in the last few years.
Laravel carries a lot of weight
A big reason PHP stays relevant is Laravel. It is genuinely one of the best web frameworks in any language. The ecosystem around it is massive. Queues, broadcasting, authentication, file storage, testing. You get a lot out of the box without pulling in a dozen packages from different authors that may or may not be maintained next year.
For client projects I still reach for Laravel first. It does everything I need and the deployment story is simple. A VPS, PHP-FPM, a database, done. No container orchestration, no serverless cold starts. It just runs.
The hate comes from people who have not used it recently
Most of the PHP criticism I see online comes from developers who last touched it in the PHP 5 era. That is like judging JavaScript based on how it felt before ES6. Languages evolve.
If you are building web applications and have not looked at PHP recently, it might be worth another look. Not because it is trendy, but because it gets out of the way and lets you ship.