Much more than most other languages, PHP is purpose-built for serving web requests. For example, PHP could get along without async/await and promises in a lot

Much more than most other languages, PHP is purpose-built for serving web requests. For example, PHP could get along without async/await and promises in a lot of situations, because threading was effectively subcontracted to the underlying web-server. You could just treat, say, a curl call as blocking-- resulting in a simpler code flow-- knowing that wouldn't lock your entire web server.