That's an unfortunate viewpoint. The point of higher level languages is to provide abstractions. To say PHP is just the right combo of not too high level enough but not too low level is some kind of mental gymnastics to justify its existence. The same argument could be made for using C over PHP.

Also, consider that some languages' ecosystems have preferences for smaller vs larger standard libraries. Clearly most of the dependencies you listed are not actually required; they're made to be stripped out if you're not using them. It's disingenious to state that those are the minumum needed for a toy app.