PHP has been around for longer than I have been alive. The most recent figure I've seen shows that almost 80% of websites are using it in some way. It's practically impossible to get into web development without learning some PHP! My experience with PHP has been mostly decent, but I prefer to use a more modern backend language. I have used it for several college projects, as well as some one-off personal projects, but the wide range of security pitfalls and (in my opinion) ugly syntax have kept me away from PHP and focused more on using languages like Javascript and Rust in the back end.