I think there's value in a large, established ecosystem.
Languages tend to go through a few years of flavour-of-the-week fads (think of the Vue/React/Angular competition, and all the also-rans that we can't remember now). If you get in too early, there's a fair chance you'll bet on the wrong ecosystem, and end up with unsupported dependencies or difficult to maintain code. In the worst case, you scrap the whole thing in six months and write it for a new framework to keep it alive.
PHP went through that phase back when "we've got to support IE6 users" was a legitimate talking point. You can be reasonably confident Wordpress or Laravel are here to stay.
PHP is also fundamentally a hugely battle-tested platform. It's been ran on 486s in the broom closet, and entire rack clusters in data centres. If you have some performance or usability problem, there's a good chance someone else has had it already and worked out a solution. With some new language, your odds of "never seen that before" errors are much higher.
Languages tend to go through a few years of flavour-of-the-week fads (think of the Vue/React/Angular competition, and all the also-rans that we can't remember now). If you get in too early, there's a fair chance you'll bet on the wrong ecosystem, and end up with unsupported dependencies or difficult to maintain code. In the worst case, you scrap the whole thing in six months and write it for a new framework to keep it alive.
PHP went through that phase back when "we've got to support IE6 users" was a legitimate talking point. You can be reasonably confident Wordpress or Laravel are here to stay.
PHP is also fundamentally a hugely battle-tested platform. It's been ran on 486s in the broom closet, and entire rack clusters in data centres. If you have some performance or usability problem, there's a good chance someone else has had it already and worked out a solution. With some new language, your odds of "never seen that before" errors are much higher.