Don't get me wrong, my whole point is that this 'simplicity' is given in any ecosystem these days.
Except live coding via FTP is something you consider part of the simplicity, then you are stuck with PHP :)
Heroku is fine but imagine you are agency managing 50 small sites. Heroku is like 7usd month minimum? You can pay 350usd month for Heroku or put it all on 20usd VPS and result will be same.
That's why all self-hosted CMSes worth something are in PHP world and there are very few in python/rails/node.
Also its not like PHP devs have been living under a rock for 20 years and don't want nice things. Git deployment is offered even by many shared hostings, people use SFTP+rsync, or things like https://deployer.org/. And there is very active market of server management tools like https://forge.laravel.com/ https://ploi.io/ https://moss.sh/ that combined with attributes of PHP will give you your own little super easy heroku.
And scaling... well most people don't need scale, you scale CMSes by caching anyway. And you can run pretty big scale just on one machine. And if you want automatic extreme scaling it's not like you can't do that with PHP https://vapor.laravel.com/
However the way rails apps works with phusion passenger is exactly what you are explaining. I can run hundreds of apps next to each other on a tiny VM. Once a app is loaded I don't have to rebuild the state on each request, if it is not needed anymore (or rather another app needs the resources more) it gets unloaded again.
Setting up passenger, nginx and git for pushing is also a job of 10 minutes max.
I get there is a market for PHP, I too recommend wordpress when I don't want to code something for someone. I just don't see it's 'simplicity' as argument.