Is PHP still a relevant language in today’s day and age? I know a LOT of languages and it just never occurred to me to learn this one, because anyone I’ve ever been aware of writing a backend these days would either choose Node or one of several compiled languages. Lemmy uses Rust for it’s backend which is highly desireable, many people would have used Golang in the backend world if they desired performance and compilation, otherwise I don’t know why you wouldn’t just use Typescript. Makes it hard to contribute to IMO.
Speaking to its “relevancy”, PHP is still by far the most widely used web language (see: WordPress).
There could be many reasons why KBin uses PHP, from general support across the widest range of platforms to accessibility of the language to facilitate extensibility, or even just because that’s what they felt most comfortable developing in.
Generally speaking if code is behaving poorly, it’s the code writer rather than the coding language itself.
Source: professional web developer with more than 15 years of experience