Lots of languages work and let you get things done. You don't have to choose PHP.

Yeah, It's because certain devs instead of adopting a defensive position in favor of PHP. They don't think in the fact that there are many alternatives of programming languages even superior than PHP for different use cases and exigencies. E.g Lua, Julia, Erlang, Python, even the slow Ruby just to name few of them.

"Lua, Julia, Erlang"

For most CRUD web development, using Lua/Julia/Erlang has a heavy cost upfront of learning, finding developers and many other issues like hosting etc. PHP works out of the box on most servers and has a mature ecosytem. So this is why I cannot just get into Lua or Julia because it is much better than PHP. It is all about cost vs benefit analysis. Sure, if I am building something like whatsapp, I should probably learn Erlang over PHP but if I am building yet another CRUD App (which most web apps are even in 2020), I am totally ok with PHP since that gives me the quickest and most mature way to get started.

People who care too much about languages remind me of the "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situation. Not every application has to be built in Julia/Lua/Rust whatever.

Are you arguing that PHP is the quickest way to get started in the case where you already know PHP but not any other language, i.e. writing a program in PHP compared to learning another language from scratch and then writing the same program in that language?

That's probably true. But if PHP is the only language you know, it might still be worthwhile to learn another one, when you have some time to spare.

And "most mature"? Other web frameworks are plenty mature. Django, Rails and Spring MVC are all roughly 15 years old.

PHP lets you get things done. You don't have to choose another language.