Not all, but php is great. Using curl to talk to external APIs is so easy and then use json_decode and setcookie - all easy to toss objects and data around, readable, immediate.<p>Yes JS has caught up mostly, but jquery... the way it looks when scanning my code is more symmetrical. Jquery paints a better "shape" representing the output. Speed reading the same code over and over trying to squeeze that new feature in, I need to snap-see what things are doing and jquery makes that "snap" faster for me.
Web dev and software dev haven't been about "what you need" for quite a while now.<p>Most devs out there use overengineered and overcomplicated frameworks/tooling in the name of a perceived short-term boost in developer speed.
It depends on the business.<p>I'm helping my girlfriend build her Chinese teaching business, pure service-based (I like to call it a Service as a Service business :P). A paid website template, Canva subscription, and a virtual assistant gets you ridiculously, ridiculously far. Even PHP would be overkill at this point.<p>My day job is working for a company that sells video call infrastructure. We needed a bit more than PHP for that :)
The problem is we use the same platform, the web, for real-time applications, games, CRUD, static blogs, and so on. It’s a flexible platform and many tools have niches in these different scopes & some _are_ quite large. But a lot of folks misdiagnose the scope & size of their projects choosing the wrong tool. Some of this is fueled by wanting to build résumés or try new hotness or just overcorrecting an ancient jQuery spaghetti that should have been a web app. Suggesting jQ+PHP is the only thing you need is naïve: both in that there isn’t a silver-bullet software architecture for all projects and that often times even jQ+PHP is overkill when a static generator could suffice.
And yet good luck landing an interview if you lack years of experience with React, Angular, Vue, Bootstrap, Typescript, Node, et cetera ad nauseum. Dependency hell is now the foyer.