As someone who has been in the industry for 6 years, I'm certainly not a rookie dev. I have simply witnessed the horrors of PHP. I don't know who in their right

As someone who has been in the industry for 6 years, I'm certainly not a rookie dev. I have simply witnessed the horrors of PHP. I don't know who in their right mind would pick PHP over Python or Go. For high volume API work you simply can't beat Go nowadays. It's fast to write, stable as hell, and the TechEmpower benchmarks make it obvious how performant it is. Python has the added bonus of all the Data Science/ML libraries with it, which seems to be the way the world is turning nowadays. Not to mention that Flask with Meinheld workers also does very well performance wise. To me you sound like a guy who has spent most of the last decade writing PHP. I've know a couple devs who used to defend PHP vigorously, mainly because thats what they knew best. Now they all write Go and haven't looked back. PHP is a story of right place right time, thats all there is too it.