PHP is still used widely and won't disappear any time soon. The reason is WordPress, hosting infrastructure, frameworks & package ecosystem and talent pool & knowledge base. Nobody is going to migrate millions of sites. Also PHP did few things right. For example, for each request PHP creates / reuses a new thread with its own isolated context where things are done mostly sequentially. This means that PHP gives you some decent horizontal scaling out of the box. Also if the code misbehaves, crashes or hangs, there is a chance that it will be limited to only one request.

https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-12/my-honest-opinion-ab...

No. PHP has been dead for years. Most of its continued usage (by a wide margin) is WordPress.

If you like PHP, you will likely easily learn and enjoy C# or Kotlin. With help from Claude or similar, you can get a project setup and be productive the same day.

> So do any of you still use core PHP either freelancing or for work in 2025?

No. PHP is dead.