It's probably not the fault of the language per se, just the culture surrounding the use of that language.

It could be argued that the same language, given another chance, would produce a similar culture, though I'm not 100% convinced of that. Anyways, what we need is a reboot of web development culture.

Maybe it's a fault of Sturgeon's law - I sort of wonder if the "necessity" to have so much web output - so many applications, so much new development does not create a situation where there is a pressure to make 95% of everything crap, because you need to get a lot of developers to make things and some of those developers are going to be crap, and you need to make lots of decisions and some of those decisions are going to be crap, and you need to do a lot of changes in short periods of time and that results in a lot of crap.

It just seems more likely to me than any culture about a language per se.

Might be, but I wouldn't discounting culture as a mechanism reinforcing it. People aren't working in isolation; they build on each other, and enshrine "best practices" that are often enough the sources of these problems.

But thinking of it, Sturgeon's law may be at play. PHP used to suffer from similar reputation to JavaScript, and only started regaining its status as a proper server choice once the masses moved to greener pastures. Sure, the language was a "fractal of bad design" and had footguns galore, but it wasn't that bad, and most of the traps were avoidable when you had half a brain and used it. The web may be crap very well because it's where anyone fresh to programming can find a high-paying job, and you can become a "senior engineer" after one year of job experience.

But that, still, is a problem. Outside of programming, there are quality standards on the market - often enforced by governments. Even if 90% of chairs are crap, you can't go and sell that crap to the public. Quality standards filter most of the crap out.

If that's the case, I'm not sure what to do. Introducing quality regulations to programming might help solve the problem of website bloat and constant leaks of private data, but it would also destroy the best thing about the web and programming in general - if you have an idea and a computer, you can make it and show it off to everyone.

PHP is considered a proper server choice these days? When did that happen? It's been a long time since I encountered a new project being written in PHP.

I don't do php but I assume any resurgence would have something to do with Laravel.