For me the best platform is one that's easy to debug and the debugging story for php is one of the worst. Otherwise it would still be quite hard to read. But at least it's cheap to host.
xdebug is pretty okay. PHP is single threaded, the entry point well defined, var_dump/die/echo works wonders, debugable by curl and simple php -S nowadays.
it has orders of magnitude less complexity than the JVM, or even the various Python server runtimes (gunicorn, uwsgi, etc)
at least in my experience. can you elaborate on what you see as the debug support deficiencies of PHP?
Not sure what exactly you refer to with "debugging", but I'm personally much happier with XDebug in VSCode, spamming my breakpoints and stepping through the code inside of the editor where I edit the code.
I can set breakpoints in my react app too, but it feels weird to inspect code in the browser console. And since modern frameworks get compiled for the browser, it is all even less familiar at a glance.
