I bet you rely on things written in PHP way more than you realize.

Exactly. See: Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, etc. People talk crap about PHP but it is a workhorse of the web.

indeed. this is largely legacy, but good luck changing that. I can't say that i miss it much, but then I don't work for either of these 2 entities. I'm familiar with what you are speaking about, so I don't think the lack of respect stems from a general ignorance of what you are referring to. It's rather people who have interacted with PHP in the past and didn't enjoy the experience.

That's a fair point.

I'm familiar with the usage stats on wordpress, lol. I can't say that this is a good thing, but if it suits your needs, have at it.

I see no reason to start any greenfield project in 2019 in PHP unless you literally only know or ever want to learn PHP. I could be wrong in terms of the entire language and it's ecosystem could have changed in the 18-20 years since I deliberated interacted with it last... We have a lot of things since mod php, so there's many other options, most of which don't involve PHP, so I suppose true fans will build their web apps in forth, I dunno...