I mean, “best” is infinitely subjective. I would be inclined to think any anyone who says “php is the best backend software ecosystem for web” doesn’t care much about programming and really only are really in the business of making money. Rust is at the creative forefront right now, it makes sense a bunch of pissed off people chose rust to make a reddit clone, it would be challenging to draw passionate engineers to a php or java project; it gives a way to draw more helpful attention (which they are as we now see squandering)