I know several people who got burn out working in the js ecosystem and who went to php instead. Finally things are quiet, stable and fast. Older people I know don't really care (I worked with IBM software in the 80s/90s, talking about slow and bloated), but the younger ones get very upset with the churn, bloat, overhead, etc.

I don't know about trends among young developers, but I can tell you that the majority of the fintech world that isn't Microsoft centered (or ancient COBOL hieroglyphics) runs on PHP these days.

I ended up finding myself in finance because I had so much PHP experience from bespoke ecommerce and never left because it's everywhere.

Other language ecosystems have things I like better personally, but if you master PHP, you will never have a problem finding work.

about 6 months ago we hired a 24 aged guy as a php developer (with more than 3 year experience). so yes. with recent changes in PHP, like modernize stack, good frameworks (laravel, symfony, hyperf) and huge speed it gains from new runtimes like swoole, openswoole, frankenphp, it is really good stack to start new projects and have almost zero need for future migration to something else. i need to mention we have GO in our backend stack as well and no plan to migrate anything but in our case GO services can easily be replaced with new PHP runtimes and we would have no performance issues.

> But do young devs/engineers even touch PHP these days?

Of course! I'm 41 and still code in PHP. ;)

I know probably 10 or more young PHP devs and zero Rust devs (regardless of age).

PHP is great, especially with Laravel.

i know js devs switching to php, modern php is something quite different than the old one

PHP has been on a steady decline for the last 10-15 years. Its a slow process, but in the end it most likely will fade out.