These clickbait articles about PHP and other languages just mislead and portray the programming business as little more than fad and fashion, as if programmers

These clickbait articles about PHP and other languages just mislead and portray the programming business as little more than fad and fashion, as if programmers read a TIOBE or StackOverflow survey and suddenly change their languages and tools. These same journalists predicted things like Tesla making every other auto manufacturer irrelevant -- they love the competition narrative and don't actually understand what they write about. WordPress has pushed their users to use Gutenberg, but you can also see a huge number of WP sites not upgrading to recent versions. I don't think anyone using WP cares about PHP or Javascript, but they do care that they either get left behind with buggy insecure old versions or rewrite their site with the Gutenberg UI. I have seen lots of PHP development in the last five years, mostly with smaller corp sites (where the PHP portion may live alongside Node or Java or C# pages), and internal sites that won't show up for crawlers and surveys. And I've seen more companies disabling PHP advertising itself in the HTTP response headers, a best practice, but one that can make PHP sites look like "other/unknown" to crawlers. I have also seen plenty of Javascript development. Pretty much every PHP site uses JS on the front-end, but I've also seen PHP and Node.js mixed on the back-end. Now I see companies experimenting with Go + Node, Go + PHP, and other mix and match stacks. Tech journalists (most of whom don't write code, because if they could write code they could make more money doing that) love the Highlander story when they write about languages getting more or less popular -- they think There can be only one. But actual software development doesn't work like that, languages don't compete for dominance, programmers rarely get to pick and choose the language or tools (because the vast majority of programmers work on legacy code). You younger programmers out there supposedly running away from PHP into the arms of Javascript -- be wary of articles like this. The numbers say something but probably not what the author interpreted them to mean. And nothing prevents a professional programmer using more than one language -- in fact choosing the right language based on multiple relevant business and technical factors -- not just fad of the year and dumb tech journalist pieces -- marks the senior developer.