I'm halfway onboard :) That is, personally I do like that PHP is kinda "boring", it's just a programming language that mostly looks like other curly brace languages that can basically do anything I ever need to do with strings out of the box. And I like that PHP, while also adopting more advanced programming concepts, stays nice with all the simple stuff. I like the stewardship, you might say, although I don't pay any attention to it. New PHP versions always either have things I don't understand, don't care about, or really like. The performance goes steadily into the correct direction, too.
I'm sure people who know more about programming and the version history will disagree about something, but for my "low-tech" usage, it's actually one of the few happy places of computing. Not happy as in exciting, more like working in a modeset garden, without stuff blowing up constantly, and salesmen posing as flowers.
But I still would love to see and try out "takes" on that, or on what other people like about it. At least to start with, I guess it would just need to be be somewhat painless to use with with Apache, NGINX, or come with a webserver built-in. Then people can use that locally and on servers they fully control, and if it's really good, and really good with resources, basically a painless additional thing to add, web hosts might adopt it etc.
Unfortunately newer versions of PHP killed it and it's dead now, and even more unfortunately while PHP absorbed a lot of features from Hack, native XML was not one of them. There was even going to be a Hack version of the Composer package manager but that never got finished AFAIK. Distros stopped supporting it. I think I still have my half-finished attempt at a Hacker News fork in Hack sitting around on a hard drive somewhere. I can't even find an environment to run it in anymore.
Having a language whose entire purpose is to be a templating language for HTML have no concept of what HTML is, is just ridiculous. You have to use a templating framework that rolls its own ad-hoc DSL and parser to manage context just to make PHP do what it should be able to do safely and sanely out of the box.
It doesn't matter now, since "web dev" is whatever JS vibe-coded nonsense Claude shits out and no one cares anymore, but ye gods it could have been so much better.
Anyway, I don't even think about server-side rendering anymore, and for the last few days have had Claude "shitting out" Vue components that replace legacy Bootstrap 3 components with html5 alternatives for my PHP app to use via Inertia.js. The axe-grinding is not helpful to either of us.
