PHP is worth learning and using

Is there a preferable language?

Nobody cares about convincing YOU; you made up your mind a long time ago and could care less about all the nice things in PHP 8, the performance improvements and the massive ecosystem and huge parts of the web still driven by PHP.

I consult with startups a lot and routinely program in a variety of programming languages -- C++, Java, Swift, Kotlin, JS/NodeJS, Python, Ruby, PHP and a bunch of bash,awk,sed and perl. Most of these languages have been evolving to support most modern programming styles and have package ecosystems that are well managed and relatively easy to use.

The point is not to prove that one language is better. For the most part, for web development, there isn't much difference in productivity for a programmer competent in the language between (JS/NodeJS, PHP, Python and Ruby) Java is a little more heavyweight for pure web development but if you have a bunch of backend services that need to be reliable you will find the type system to be of help.)

What is more important for productivity is a deep familiarity with the frameworks, and tools -- the IDEs CI systems etc. that you need to build and deploy your solution.

The other important thing is the ease with which you can hire programmers for that language in your market. Here in India finding PHP programmers is easier than say finding Kotlin programmers but harder than finding Java programmers. But that is not the case in other markets like the US. There is also the issue of perception of candidates. If like you, a large majority of candidates think the language is legacy, you'll end up having to pay more to hire them (because they will be harder to find -- most of the extra cost will be search costs not salary costs.)

To the extent that the PHP community can convince folks that it is not a legacy language (and it really isn't) that is good for not just the language but the overall tech community. And this article furthers that goal well.

if people are out here voluntarily writing server-side javascript code, I see no reason to call PHP dead