I didn't read the replies first, but will post my response to the question. I started working on a customers PHP project in Sept 2020, which was written in PHP 4.2 between 2004 to 2010 by some Chinese students from China. They did a terrible job, and everything you can possibly do wrong they did wrong. I can't even read the code. Anyways, it was so bad, that I told the customer that they really need to sort of start from scratch again. Why I chose pure PHP 7.4 for them. Drum roll please .... Because of time and money ... So many of the new technologies are constantly being updated so fast, that it's hard to keep up with the changes. PHP 7.4 is still that Swiss Army knife that can do almost anything, and PHP doesn't bug you to update code, or doesn't require a team of skilled software engineers to maintain over decades. Once you write it and deploy, it can run for a long time without more time and money. I can move on to the next project, and the customer can use their new app for years to come, and pass that app to their next generation of children that will take over the business when they come home from College or University. Our economy in the US has a strong service sector, comprised of small business owners with family involved, and have become generational now spanning their services across decades of time. I look at pure PHP 7.4+ from an economic point of view, and not from a superior technology point of view, considering time, labor, capital investment and maintenance being more stable and predictable across good times and bad. I don't agree with PHP Laravel as being a framework built on PHP, but opted for pure PHP, in which I was able to build a near MVC type of Web Application using modern objects and smarter HTML views with the objects, and include robust HTTP request and response handling, and robust security features. I have no regrets in my decision for my customers path forward, and I'm very happy with the results. Well that's my argument for PHP. May not be what you were expecting to hear or read, but I hope it satisfies your thirst to know why.
If it ain't broke don't fix it Discover my world at jkirkerx.com