Also, the PHP ecosystem is friendly to beginners. Compare these authentication docs for a PHP project vs a .NET project:
Laravel (PHP): https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/authentication ASP.NET Core (.NET): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authen...
This is available with many other languages as well, i.e. https://github.com/cosmtrek/air
It may require an external tool, but the deployment experience is a lot simpler for Go than PHP.
I personally spend a lot of time hopping among technologies and I always lean heavily on documentation. PHP has pretty good documentation, and this helps a lot in my opinion. I would guess that a lot of developers don't read the docs and just assume that something in a less-familiar language will work exactly like they expect it to, and then call this a "gotcha" when it doesn't.
Not sure about the productivity claim. I once wrote from scratch (frameworks excluded) backend and frontend (version 1) of a multi-tenant, cloud-based video-sharing platform with PHP as the backend (aws cloud) in a matter of weeks.
I once wrote, from scratch (frameworks excluded), an entire backend (and front-end) of version 1 of a hybrid mobile app (backend in PHP) for a medium-size logistics company in a matter of less than 2 months.
I have other examples, but life is too short trying to convince "haters" that they might not be 100% correct.
I was the only developer on both of those projects. Your mileage may vary :)