That's certainly true, but we're living in a funny time, everything has evolved so quickly that there are 15yr old PHP apps rubbing shoulders with 7yr old Rails

That's certainly true, but we're living in a funny time, everything has evolved so quickly that there are 15yr old PHP apps rubbing shoulders with 7yr old Rails apps next to 4yr old Node apps and now React etc. Some of that represents actual progress, some fashion, but for all those legacy apps, someone has to keep the lights on (until the plug gets pulled). That said, I don't really miss PHP too much, it was much nicer than Perl for adding a little magic to html, but building anything big was not fun (I gather Laravel makes that better these days, but there are a lot of other choices if you're starting fresh).