You got it backwards there. PHP was pretty bad (mostly because it was easy to pick up so novice and shitty programmers used it a lot), but got insanely better, and it absolutely stood the test of time - most of modern web still uses it and it isn’t going anywhere. There are also few languages that would have such a robust ecosystem where you could whip up a solid, complete app in a few hours. JS comes close but its ecosystem is a clusterfuck. Everything else has poor third party support - be it libraries, connectors to various services or just simply best practices (for web).