Good for people who are starting out but if you've already been in the industry for a while the way forward should be JavaScript for both front end/backend stuff. At least that is the ongoing trend. This is not to say one should totally migrate from PHP to something else. It definitely has its uses. So we've got to pick the right technology for the task in hand. For example, nothing beats wordpress when it comes to deploying a blog or some enterprise web site etc etc. I've started out as a PHP developer 6 years ago and in the meantime during those six years I've slowly embraced JS based front end tech such as Angular and Vue. Nowadays my PHP use has become limited to just developing APIs for JS frontends. And in my latest project I've even replaced Laravel with a Node based HapiJS for the API.
Anyway someone got to start somewhere.
