There's plenty of stacks that I'd say qualify as "simple, cheap, straightforward, and fast" (modern Java, for instance - huge red flag to me if people still turn up their nose at Java), including some that you'd probably consider exotic (honourable mention: Elixir+Phoenix).
I personally never liked PHP, so I haven't kept up with how it has developed and I don't expect to start, to be honest. Of course, if you've got an otherwise interesting project that happens to be PHP and want to pay me to help you with it, I'll be professional about it, but there are too many alternatives that appeal to me more than PHP for anything where I have a say.
I personally never liked PHP, so I haven't kept up with how it has developed and I don't expect to start, to be honest. Of course, if you've got an otherwise interesting project that happens to be PHP and want to pay me to help you with it, I'll be professional about it, but there are too many alternatives that appeal to me more than PHP for anything where I have a say.