Your observation on abstraction is interesting. I've always considered PHP to be quite the opposite. e.g. Going from PHP to NodeJS, NodeJS is a lot more direct

Your observation on abstraction is interesting. I've always considered PHP to be quite the opposite. e.g. Going from PHP to NodeJS, NodeJS is a lot more direct and less abstracted (handling the request directly, reading the request data incrementally and handling reader state, setting headers and then explicitly writing to the buffer, handling connection state, etc.) - note I do mean NodeJS here, not something like Express another e.g. PSR-7 I find is, counterintuitively, actually much less abstracted than raw PHP built-ins as it goes out if it's way to map the interfaces to the stack as intended, rather than completely arbitrary weird abstractions. Like the retrieval of query parameters being entirely separate and unrelated to retrieval of the body payload, whereas PHP tends to sort of conflate these things in $_GET/$_POST/$_REQUEST and then doesn't really have obvious intuitive handling of non-x-form-url-encoded payloads. And don't get me started on query string array handling. I do completely agree with the article though, and I still use PHP a lot. Voluntarily. But I just found your specific observation surprising.