No matter how modern PHP becomes every year… it just beats its previous version in performance, but the underlying architecture is still the same and cannot compete with other languages, especially when using frameworks like symfony, etc.
For example.
If you run a node/go/rust server and you hit the endpoint /hello which returns a simple “hello world”, they will just return that. PHP (symfony) however, has to initialize and execute the whole framework stuff, before returning a simple “hello world”
Edit: Introducing something like Redis for caching, etc… can help in reducing the overload, but imho, it’s just a bandaid