In a lot of ways it is not different from Rails or Django. Just approaching it from a non-technical market with a ton of plugins. You can in fact add an API and execute PHP or use it as an API Gateway.
Definitely been tempted to use it but as others have said to do anything useful requires a ton of plugins that integrate in weird ways and have to pay subscriptions for the useful features.
But still I think it is one of the best ways for non-technical people to creating websites quickly.
Yes, interesting comment. It also well predates Laravel (not sure about Rails) and that plus backwards compatibility all the way back to archaic PHP versions explains some of the cruft (but not all of the suboptimal design).
Definitely been tempted to use it but as others have said to do anything useful requires a ton of plugins that integrate in weird ways and have to pay subscriptions for the useful features.
But still I think it is one of the best ways for non-technical people to creating websites quickly.