I worked with PHP solely for years and always thought the language was good for me but that it made it easy for codebases to go to shit. I’ve worked with half a dozen other languages now and have realized all codebases just suck for the individual because like all things people are heavily opinionated about how the code should be organized.

As for react, I work with a medium sized code base in the hundreds of thousands of lines and all I have to do is alt tab since it hot reloads for me. Don’t see how PHP is any better since it isn’t even hot reloading. Also with react I can update css and it doesn’t lose the state which is nice for debugging style changes.