> but the tooling in PHP is amateur hour by comparison
Looks like maybe the ignorance goes both ways? People really underestimate the size and maturity of the PHP web development ecosystem and it's professional community, and there's no shortage of tooling to build and support apps on the language.
Composer shored up package management. Laravel and Symfony offer robust framework ecosystems. PHP 7 bridged the performance gap with HHVM. Libraries for a wide-range of critical infrastructure services from databases (Postgres, MySQL, Elasticache, Redis) to messaging systems (AMQP, Kafka, ) to monitoring and observability (New Relic/DataDog, Prometheus, Sentry). Cloud support is ubiquitous.
Even the top packages are pedestrian things like logging, event dispatching, sub-process management, and testing.
But PHP has a Microsoft-level of baggage, and those bridges can't be unburned.
Laravel is a great framework, but the tooling in PHP is amateur hour by comparison. The app ecosystem in Django is only comparable to Rails'.