This matches my experience. In the old days (mid-2000's) I did a ton of PHP freelance work. This was done mostly with home grown "frameworks", built around HTML

This matches my experience. In the old days (mid-2000's) I did a ton of PHP freelance work. This was done mostly with home grown "frameworks", built around HTML form to MySQL database mapping and CRUD operations. This was before REST APIs were really a thing, everything was page driven ("SSR" in today's terms, I guess.) For anything dynamic, we'd use JQuery, make an ajax call, return partial HTML, and inject it into the page. It was actually incredibly productive. I later moved on to Laravel and ditched the home grown stuff for newer projects. I don't do PHP work much these days (permanent "working from home" made me not want to do any extra work from home after hours), but it felt incredibly productive compared to the more modern tech I've seen in my day jobs. There's a lot of crap to wade through nowadays. A typical small project might have a React front end, Python back end, REST API's, documentation, cloud deployments, on-and-on. Web development isn't fun anymore.