https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-toyota-corolla-of-programming/
So true and still running LAMP stack.
I have really lost touch with what has happened in the PHP world.
A few years ago my niece got a PHP job at a startup after working at several high-profile companies (Etsy for one, but I forget the others). It made me realize how much PHP work had professionalized.
For a while I was contributing to Drupal, but at a certain point, the need to be able to run Docker and unit testing and understand the complicated namespaces of Symfony (which underlies Drupal) just overwhelmed me as someone who was not in the weeds everyday. It really moved from a thing that a historian with a FORTRAN/Pascal background could pick up quickly to put a research database online to something that seemed as hard as programming in C++.
I ended up going down a lot of rabbit holes from the links in that article and realized I would hardly know where to get started in serious PHP programming now.
A couple of more whimsical mostly OT items...
>"Beyond Java"
I remember back when the WMW PHP forum was busy and there was a vogue for Java Server Pages, fellow mod Adam's (jatar_k's) boss went to a conference where some speaker sold them all on the idea that all serious websites would be switching to JSP. He said they needed to get out ahead of this and convert their website to from .php to .jsp pages.
There was some gnashing of teeth and rending of garments by staff when Adam said not to worry, he would handle it. He waited a week, then wrote a simple mod_rewrite rule and lo and behold, all the pages were now *jsp pages. The boss was happy that they now had a fully modern website.