It’s one of a plethora of scripting languages from the '90s which were designed to be the antithesis of “fail fast” and kept going no matter what.

I guess what with C/C++ being the Mainstream Option at the time, not having to deal with a strict compiler must have felt like freedom. As someone who has had to maintain, cleanup and migrate ancient PHP code, I call it folly. That mindset of “let the programmer just do whatever and keep trucking” breeds awful programming practices and renders static analysis varying degrees of useless, which makes large-scale refactoring hard to automate which is just amazing when your major versions aren’t even remotely FUCKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE.

PHP’s original design is just fundamentally atrocious. It became popular in large part because unmaintainable code is usually someone else’s problem.

A language that I would definitely use for server-side rendering and that was already good from its first stable release is Go. It was thoughtfully designed and lends itself really well to static analysis, while still being easy to write and decently performant.