I know it can result in a lot of "extra work", but I really feel like most of the pain of that could be abstracted away by the runtime.
Nginx/apache setup a PHP process before the request comes in, so why couldn't you expose that point to your language and let the programming language do work before that point, even "snapshot"ing it to avoid re-doing that work for each request?
It just seems like there are better ways of solving this problem, because an event loop is such a "hammer" solution to the problem.
(On my systems, by default there is some reuse of the loaded module, so you can leak state between requests. However it should be possible to avoid reused processes).
import cgi
You also need to restart apache or change the wsgi loader file, (or set up explicit hoooks to do so) to get your new code to appear when debugging / after uploading changes. This is where I'd say php is superior (upload file, refresh browser).
There are. Any language that supports either fastcgi, or runs as an apache plugin (or similar) functions in the "each request starts new" space. There's certainly others, but Python and Perl are both good examples.
Starting new with each request does, of course, mean lots of re-work that shouldn't have to be done with each request. It does initially keep complexity down, but at scale, the applications I've worked with have to use a shared cache (like acpu) to avoid that rework and meet performance goals.