I use Scala, Typescript, R, some Go and some Swift daily and have been using typed languages for 20 years+ and would still recommend PHP to someone wanting to throw together a brochureware site for the best cost/hassle ratio.

Almost no one is solving FANG problems, and people literally throw their clients/businesses money away on poor value because they've lost focus on what's important: delivering a solution for what they need right now, not what you want to spend your time playing with.

Also what is the big deal with type safe templates when you're literally just abstracting building HTML strings?

I totally agree with what you're saying.

While PHP is still a joke compared to even Java which it very hard tries to become (which I think is a good thing), for someone who only knew PHP the entire time, the situation still got much, much better over the last decade...

I am someone using React, NextJS and Typescript who really wishes they went with Symfony. It'd be so much simpler.

I've heard you can combine React with Symfony, which sounds really cool.

You may want to try some more functional languages to complement your experience: Reason/OCaml/F#/Haskel/Elm/PureScript or even the more OO ones that copy some features over: Rust or Kotlin.

React is not a language. TypeScript is very close to PHP, both in imperativeness, in OO-ness, in did-not-initially-support-it-but-sometimes-added-it-later-but-now-its-a-mess-ness, in BW-compatible-ness, in quirkiness.

I’ve (informally) taught Haskell and I’ve used Elm/Erlang/Elixir/etc. I absolutely love functional programming and definitely regard it as the “ideal future”, but it’s not ready today. Especially the ecosystem.

I know React is not a language, but I listed the whole stack to compare it to IHP, which seems to try to combine everything. Which is good! I’d love a Django/RoR esque Haskell platform.