Please elaborate why PHP is an inadequate tool for developing multi-platform, network-intensive applications?

Go has much better concurrency, networking, and packaging capabilities. NodeJS can be used for both, front-end and back-end, including iOS / Android. Clojure(Script) provides more than Go and NodeJS combined, but was too new at the time. Even Python would be a much more powerful choice than PHP for anything, that is not a simple LAMP application.

Most of your points are irrelevant (packaging, JS as a compilation target, mobile development) as they do not support your argument that PHP would be inadequate for the task at hand. You seem not to like PHP, which is fine, neither do I, but this is not conclusive.

I have spent many years doing PHP development and still do, but the only technical people I know who pick PHP for new projects are the ones, for whom it's the only programming language they know. Therefore, my trust in their all-around competence is very limited.