[geek_at]

Wow very in depth comment. Maybe I'll spin up a dev container and play around with php

[johnisgood]

I missed an important difference (because I did not consider it to be relevant to "warts"[1] and "ease of use"), which is that modern PHP has Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation now, not an interpreted runtime, which offers significant performance improvements!

[1] On second thought, poor performance could be considered a wart.