To be fair, it is my understanding that PHP is still king in the niche of "simple language with practically zero cost to spin up and deal with a web request."

To be fair, it is my understanding that PHP is still king in the niche of "simple language with practically zero cost to spin up and deal with a web request." Now it _may_ be that the erroneously named "serverless" architectures that are the soup du jour will make this less true, but I don't have enough insight on web stuff to know how that's proceeding.