I've passed over that learning hump, put some projects into production with React, NextJS, and Vue, and I still think PHP + native JS/HTML is the more pragmatic tooling choice. It's more simple, robust and easy to debug. I've been experiencing some other backend frameworks too, specifically Node and Ruby stacks, and the PHP ecosystem and language is ahead by a country mile.

I think if you want to pick a pragmatic toolkit to work with long term and kick the churn to the curb, PHP is a great choice for web applications and will continue to be for a long time thanks to it's diaspora.

PHP (or, in my case these days, Deno serving templates, typically nunjucks) that have https://htmx.org/ in them for interactivity gets you productive, quickly, for a lot of the tasks I need to do.

That said, React makes building even more interactive, complicated things simple, and is easy to hire for, so thats what we use at work.

I do think the world is still ripe for a PHP-like language. The template-style webserver-aware way of doing things, with modern features. Maybe one day.