Money has nothing to do with a specific language. It comes down to how good you are as a developer. There are plenty of high paying jobs where PHP is used as a backend language. I don't understand this argument about how PHP doesn't have money. It is true that PHP has a lot of low quality programmers due to barrier to entry and WordPress tweaks but that is not it.

It doesn’t matter how good of an AppleSoft Basic programmer you are, if no one wants a Basic programmer, you aren’t going to make any money.

On the other hand, if the market is saturated with developers of a language, you still can’t command a high salary.

It also doesn’t matter if you’re a “10x developer” if all the company wants is another software as a service CRUD app.

Companies who want good developers who are interested in their career and technology aren’t doing PHP.

From a personal anecdote, I worked for a company that had one legacy product that was written in PHP and one new product that was written in C#. The company couldn’t get any traction on their new project but was getting business modifying their legacy PHP product. Once we as developers saw that the roadmap for the next year was doing PHP, all 14 developers left within the next three months.

None of us wanted to waste a year of our life and put on our resume that we wrote a “PHP website”.

It's not always that simple. Often major cities will have more c#/java/enterprise jobs because they're the offices of big companies with big complex needs whereas regional areas and smaller cities will have more php/ruby jobs. So a direct salary comparison is useless because it's not like for like.

But why would you want to limit yourself to those jobs? Even if you don’t have a desire to love in the city center of a major metropolitan area, there are always the burbs and the cost of living vs salary is still excellent almost anywhere besides the West coast and NYC or DC.

If you are an average C#/Java/Node developer, companies will be lining up to give you a much better paying job.

> But why would you want to limit yourself to those jobs?

You aren't limiting yourself to those jobs, you're constraining yourself to a geographical area (there may be any number of good reason for this) and optimizing your learning path for the jobs available in that area.

Even if it is sub-optimal in the costs/salary sense, there is much more to life.