Because it's good enough for almost everything. The vast majority of projects will never have to scale to billions of users, so hyperscalability is not a huge concern.
It has a low barrier to entry and great language features - static typing being one of the big ones. It has become a really nice language over the years, great to work in and in no way less satisfying or effective than for example golang.
> The vast majority of projects will never have to scale to billions of users, so hyperscalability is not a huge concern.
I would have thought PHP would scale very well. It may not be high performance, but its start each request-response cycle from scratch should scale horizontally very well, surely?
It does. But scaling to billions of users (or billions of requests per day) is still not easy and you really need high performance for that. Laravel scales to a certain point, where their design decisions (eloquent, the queuing system etc.) are still working.
That said, with today's PHP it is possible to optimize the hot path pretty well with stuff like FFI.
> It has a low barrier to entry and great language features - static typing being one of the big ones
... and it's completely optional in many cases on top of that. Even if you're using third party libraries, it will only crash if you mess up your types at the library's interface.
It has a low barrier to entry and great language features - static typing being one of the big ones. It has become a really nice language over the years, great to work in and in no way less satisfying or effective than for example golang.
And, of course, laravel exists.