in the last decade I don't know when compilation has ever been something I've ever thought about, all modern frameworks for any language just hot code reload for you.

although if you're talking about your deploy process being dragging and dropping files onto an ftp server, not only is that horrifying but it doesn't win out on automating it with any one click deployment tool out there

This also results in easily breaking production.

On the other hand, if your production is already broken, it's much easier and quicker to apply a hotfix in PHP (just edit a file on the server directly) without waiting for the whole CI/CD to finish.

This leads in turn to testing/developing in prod. I do not personally miss it. If you have CI/CD you should not be able to skip it. Maybe putting it under a feature flag would be a safer alternative.

I was talking about a situation when prod is already down and something is better than nothing. For example, once we forgot to add timeouts to calls to a third-party service, everything worked great for a year, then suddenly the third-party server started hanging for no reason which made all our PHP processes hang, too, and those processes were holding DB connections so we went out of DB connections as well and the whole production went down. We quickly found the root cause and applied a hot fix (setting the timeout) by editing a PHP script on the prod server without waiting for the usual cycle "pull request -> code review -> deploy to stage -> testing -> release" which can take an hour.

But that leads us to another feature of PHP - It is fun!

Can you not do this with Python?