> PHP made a lot of careers for developers as they were able to fake it until they made it while learning how to code & providing significant value to a businesses.
Unfortunately it also provided a lot of careers to developers who never got to the "make it" stage.
I think it's a bit harsh and elitist to label this with "unfortunately"; for developers like the ones you mention, often their goal or aspiration is not to work in a FAANG or silicon valley startup; they want to make a decent living as a developer in their city and this provides that career for them. Many of those companies aren't trying to be the next unicorn, they're just small dev teams trying to maintain a web site for their business.
Why on earth is that unfortunate? Seems like a positive thing to me, even if some people don't make it to the pinnacle of their craft so what? If someone has gainful employment and meaning in their life I see that as a net positive.
Because many times, they write bad, buggy software. Because other people end up having to maintain it, or fix it, or replace it. Or they release things like plugins that malfunction, but because they're the best out of a set of bad options, end up being the de-facto solution that everyone has to deal with.
I'm not talking about people who build software that works ok, but has bad patterns. I'm talking about people who write cash register software that uses floating-point math to do calculations, or Wordpress plugins that fill up error logs with garbage or nearly DDoS sites because they don't understand how to write efficient code.
Not that I've done any of the above as an early PHP developer, no sir...
Unfortunately it also provided a lot of careers to developers who never got to the "make it" stage.