[tmh88j]

You seem to be emphasizing syntax rather than features of the languages and the stack itself. PHP was designed from the ground up for the backend side of web. Python, JS and Java were not. Many fundamental web development features are built into PHP like sessions, cookies, HTTP request variables, while a language interface server like Gunicorn or runtime like node is required to generate much of that from the incoming request and forward it to your application. Once it gets to your application either you or a library then needs to track those cookies, sessions, etc.. That's all built into PHP. So instead of a call sequence for a python/node app being request -> nginx -> Gunicorn -> python app, with PHP it's just request -> nginx/apache -> php app. There are plenty of other web-specific features that are dead simple in PHP like header redirects and HTML templating, whereas with python/node/java they have to be implemented by you, your framework or a language interface server.

[slt2021]

I like index.php type websites, that are not verbose.

but PHP code that consists of 30+ composers modules, each with 10+ classes with overengineered OOP crap does not encourage me to touch this code with a 10ft pole.

This has devolved into js type of crappy coding, and I can use JS for that, dont need PHP.

[tmh88j]

I'm not exactly sure what you're suggesting, but blaming sloppy codebases you've seen is an unfair, cheap shot at the language instead of calling out bad developers, which applies to every language. PHP is inherently less complex than languages like JS and python for the backend and results in fewer dependencies because it comes with more features specific to web development out of the box. Quite literally no features required to build even a very basic dynamic website come with JS out of the box: sessions, password hashing, database connectors, input sanitizing, cookies, html templating, etc... It all needs to be either written by you or installed as a dependency. They're all standard features in PHP.