Thing is, what reasonable other options are there on “normal” hosting plans where you don’t get to micromanage or add other languages. An out of the box hosting plan for “normal people” isn’t going to let you start dicking around on the command line with NPM or adding node.js… Python? Good luck. I mean you end up stuck with Perl or PHP, of the two…

Sure, the types who are qualified to write stuff in any of these languages could just grab a cheap VPN, follow howToForge’s “perfect server” and be off to the races on a dime… but normal people get “managed hosting” and that limits the choices a lot.

And to be frank, if all you want to do is output HTML, the alternatives to PHP tend to actually be garbage. Just look at how React when used CSR only (aka what most people learn) tells large swaths of users to go F*** themselves, and when used for SSR it turns into a giant cluster-F*** of ignorance, incompetence, and ineptitude… resulting in people writing two to ten times the code needed to do the job.

Though that seems to be what’s hot and trendy right now… two to ten times the code, ten to twenty times the effort, turning weeks into months, and then circle-jerking each-other over how “modern” we all are following the latest “trends” and hopping from language to language and tech stack to tech stack with all the frequency of a cheap AM radio.

Just look at the mental-huffing-midgetry of HTML/CSS “frameworks’ resulting in people using 100k of HTML to do 10k’s job, 500k of CSS to do 32 to 48k’s job, and megabytes of dumbass client side scripting on pages that might not even warrant its presence.

Hardly a shock we’re seeing the same thing server side where NPM packages are the gateway drug for blind copypasta development, where not half the dev’s out there aren’t even qualified to debug their own “work” because they didn’t actually write any of it!