> PHP is popular, especially for small projects
Not especially for small projects, for projects of all sizes - huge swathes of the internet still run on PHP, and it's not limited to blogs built on Wordpress.
More than a few gigantic sites (Wikipedia and PornHub come to mind) are built with PHP. This is highly anecdotal but I still see the .php extension all over the place, sometimes in sites that perform really well BTW (again, Wikipedia is a good example here).