PHP has quite a few things going for it. File-system based routing before it was cool. Each request cycle is isolated, so an error in your script won't bring do

PHP has quite a few things going for it. File-system based routing before it was cool. Each request cycle is isolated, so an error in your script won't bring down the whole server. With shared hosting, you get something very similar to serverless functions today. The language was created with embedding tags from the start, so there is no need to build or use 3rd party template parser. Everything outside of php tags just gets outputted as strings, very similar to JSX. The biggest downside is (was?) C-style file includes, instead of packages.