Stack choice gets treated as a taste question online and a risk question in a boardroom, and the boardroom framing is the correct one. For a mid-market platform that needs to be maintainable for the next decade, not just demoable next quarter, three things matter more than trend: hiring pool, hosting cost, and long-term support.
You can hire for it in five years
A stack is only as good as your ability to staff it after your original team moves on. PHP has one of the deepest hiring pools of any server-side language, in every market we operate in, which matters enormously once a platform is past its first year.
Hosting cost is not a rounding error
PHP hosting is commodity infrastructure. That keeps operating costs predictable, which matters more to a mid-market business watching monthly burn than it does to a well-funded startup optimising for developer preference.
Boring is a feature, not a compromise
We choose the stack that fits the problem and the client's five-year horizon, and for a large share of business platforms, that is still PHP. We use other stacks where they genuinely fit better, but "unfashionable" and "wrong choice" are not the same thing.