I'd say PHP is great to get started, Go is for when you need more control, more mechanical sympathy.
I did write a REST/JSON API in PHP 5.2 (two years ago, I'm aware there's newer versions out there but they aren't easily available in RHEL 6/7 used at our customers at the time - it was a slow moving industry); it's doable, and using best practices learned from other languages makes it look maintainable at least.
Did run into some issue with large datasets though, but that was an implementation problem; the original author would read a CSV, convert it to XML using concatenation, then parse the XML to convert it into JSON because at some point a decade ago he found out that the X in XHR was no longer (and never was) the norm, all in memory. That broke when there were more than a few thousand rows in the CSV.
I did write a REST/JSON API in PHP 5.2 (two years ago, I'm aware there's newer versions out there but they aren't easily available in RHEL 6/7 used at our customers at the time - it was a slow moving industry); it's doable, and using best practices learned from other languages makes it look maintainable at least.
Did run into some issue with large datasets though, but that was an implementation problem; the original author would read a CSV, convert it to XML using concatenation, then parse the XML to convert it into JSON because at some point a decade ago he found out that the X in XHR was no longer (and never was) the norm, all in memory. That broke when there were more than a few thousand rows in the CSV.