More broadly, a lot of people are disinclined from anything that needs to run on the server, especially anything involving dynamic languages, because that brings vulnerabilities and an elevated need to keep it all patched up. Static HTML/CSS/JS can be hosted from a wide variety of zero maintanence solutions and can’t be exploited.

It might have gotten better since, but back when I was running a Wordpress install it was a constant battle to keep bots out.

It's not even the fact that you're running a dynamic language or something. PHP is to some extent and Wordpress's ecosystem is to a large extent, extremely horrendous. Ridden with vulnerabilities and performance issues that should not exist by now. As the other comment says, Laravel can be fine in some situations, but that's a tiny fraction of all PHP usage.

I occasionally do freelance work that involves PHP. I won't touch Wordpress with a 10 foot pole. PHP can be fine with a framework like Laravel. Wordpress reminds me of PHP from 2 decades ago.