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 know that "PHP" is a dirty word, hereabouts, but I submit Exhibit A, the "fishtank graph": https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...
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.