Couldn't you also make this argument for JS in general? I think many folks looking from the outside in at JS would argue that the amount of "JS garbage" has alr

Couldn't you also make this argument for JS in general? I think many folks looking from the outside in at JS would argue that the amount of "JS garbage" has already surpassed PHP. I know you specified _without dependencies_, but I don't know that it's a fair comparison. The standard library for PHP and JS seem fairly similar to me; I work with both languages daily. Using NPM packages are much easier imo for greenfield projects. PHP before Composer still had a ton of 3rd party script usage, but with explicit imports instead of autoloading.