To provide an actual data point: I successfully built one of the largest messaging APIs using PHP. We had a horizontally (and dynamically) scalable architecture

To provide an actual data point: I successfully built one of the largest messaging APIs using PHP. We had a horizontally (and dynamically) scalable architecture, ran hundreds of worker nodes in Kubernetes, that processed thousands of messages per second. The nice things about PHP were: * Interoperability with the rest of our ecosystem, including the web platform: We could share code and install modules in all projects * Availability of packages: For lots of common use cases, there are high-quality libraries available, such as process forking, socket communication, or message queues * Easy to go from PoC to production: Start out with no-brainer arrays, then move to typed data structures easily I find all the syntax critique on PHP to be completely irrelevant. It's a high-performance, dynamically typed scripting language. I can build the same things in it as with Go, Python or TypeScript, but the ecosystem is stable, tweaking it for production is easy, and it goes from "shoddy hackathon script" to "fully typed, production-grade application" smoothly. There's a single, pretty great package manager; type checking, although limited, works at runtime; code doesn't need to be compiled prior to running. All this makes it a good choice even for big projects to me.