> - it's stateless by design (much easier to scale)

"By design" PHP encourages very very stateful procedural programming. It is one of the languages, where making things not mutate state seems like a mostly unused strategy. The amount of beginner code people find online and that mindset of "if it works it works shrug" continues to keep bad code alive.

The thing that might be referred to here by "stateless" is that a PHP "application" runs the code from top to bottom, as if all was one long script. This primitive handling has its own issues of course, but I will admit, that sometimes it is useful, that you can change the code and do not need to restart PHP or anything, because you will get the new script executed when the next request comes in.

> - it was "serverless" before Serverless

Where "serverless" is just a buzzword. PHP runs on a server just like many other languages. You will need a machine acting as a server, you will need PHP installed, you will need some webserver, usually something like Apache or NGINX with fpm or some other shenanigan. Nothing really special there.

> - surprisingly performant

Which in part, I would claim, is due to its reckless way of handling types, introducing hidden bugs. The type system is quite underdeveloped and cannot give many guarantees. No generics, no general object type, which everything inherits from, but only an object type, which not every other object inherits from. Then that "mixed" type, which just makes things even more fuzzy in a signature of a procedure and encourages bad design again.

Of course, if you throw all safety overboard, then you can get a bit more speed. Not really impressive.

> - no "unknown unknowns". it's so tried-and-true, there's no surprises

I just recently looked at defining constants in PHP. But I could not see in the docs, what the scope of a constant is. Simply not to be found. I just had to try it and hope. This is often the case with PHP and its half-baked docs.

> - deployment is so simple, just drop a file on a web server. No middleware needed.

But the webserver is the middleware you need. Like mentioned above, some Apache you need to configure, or some NGINX, or some other server. Maybe you have only ever deployed on managed infrastructure and never done the actual full deployment? Always enjoyed other people setting things up for you? I guess this is true for most of the people claiming, that PHP deployment is simpler than in other languages.

> - No long compile times because there is no compiling needed.

That again comes at the cost of safety. PHP types if you declare them in the code are not checked at compile time, but only when the code runs, making them merely annotations to read for another person.

In the PHP world we have learned not much from the past decades of programming language design. It is understandable. Lots of people have build tons of almost breaking things on top of PHP's design flaws and would start a riot, if things ever changed. For the sake of backwards compatibility PHP will remain in its swamp of bad design choices.

Sure, people can try to build on top of that, abstracting from it all through more modern web frameworks, plastering over all of the flaws. Sooner or later though, you will need to use some actual PHP code in there somewhere and the bad design will rear its head again.