One thing PHP got right is its 'PHP must die' mode of operation where every request spawns a new process (ok, not a process anymore but still an isolated execution environment that lasts until the response is served.
Java, Ruby, C#, etc are mostly used for application servers and this massively complicates everything.
For an engineer, it feels like one-process-per-request model, even with php-fpm and other optimizations should be much harder to scale than Java applications servers, but the reality is different.
I've spent many years doing PHP and Java-based development. Often times in parallel, having PHP projects on the side and earning money in Java development.
At some point, I had a stint of several years doing exclusively PHP-based work.
Every single time, PHP projects I worked on were serving orders of magnitude more people orders of magnitude cheaper than Java-based projects.
And when I say "orders of magnitude", it is not an exaggeration but sad truth.
I am now in the Java land again, because pay is better. My current project has already burnt several millions serving 20 secretaries that handle 1000 individual cases each year.
My mind is with the PHP project I sold several years ago when it was serving 120,000 people at the cost of a few hundred euros per year + my labor, which was essentially free, but if I could slap my usual daily rate on it, it would still be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000€/year.
Even this blog is written using Drupal 7, a 14-years old PHP software that still works perfectly well and needs little maintenance. Go find a similar Java piece of software.