I would invest in learning Rails 7 and Hotwire. Seems to have a great ROI for the effort put in. It can scale pretty far as well and you will be able to focus more time on delivering value.
The technical excellence road has a lot of dead ends and false prophets. Be aware!
There are some really big, well-written (and badly-written) systems out there, in PHP, and it's a great place to learn about some of the baseline technologies that any aggregate Internet system will use.
But I have never liked the language, myself, despite having developed some fair proficiency in it. These days, I like doing really nice frontend work, in native Swift. PHP is what I use to create backends. It works fine.
I'd definitely agree with Rails. IMHO it has been defining Web development for a long time. Even today patterns from Rails like are copied outside of the Rails context. Service Objects seem to be a recent example.
Hotwire seems definitely cool tech but after having been exposed to Ruby on Rails it's possible to go into various directions. (Classical server-side rendering, Hotwire or e.g. React-based SPAs)
The technical excellence road has a lot of dead ends and false prophets. Be aware!