[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.