I have been developing almost exclusively in Python for the last 4 years (occasional C#, Java and PHP) and although my entire team disparages PHP it is really quicker and fewer characters for most stuff.

Luckily IDEs can auto add the imports, but sometimes a slightly mistyped piece of code auto adds an import I need to delete, I love avoiding imports and circular imports in PHP. The other nice thing is avoiding random python behaviour differences in MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu. Code that works fine in CircleCI but not locally. Works on a Mac but not on windows etc… I didn’t experience that with PHP.

Not sure there are a huge number of long term PHP devs who switch to Python or the other way around to have a reasonable opinion.

This is a rather uninteresting statement, as we all live in bubbles - knowledge of them helps, but really just puts you in a different bubble. Still a bubble.

I'd say all metrics point to the popularity of Python increasing, while there is no data indicating that people are fleeing Python en masse. Or at all, actually.