It’s worth noting that although some development houses use frameworks, many, many, do not.

To quote one other developer I’ve heard, “Frameworks are for developers that don’t know how to spell library.”

A framework forces a certain collection of packages, reduces the number of compatibilities, and generally forces devs into a box.

That said, in Php’s favor, unlike languages like Ruby with Rails, it’s not tied to a specific framework. There are some out there, but fortunately, they’re purely optional.

Also, PHP has another advantage. It is the only robust server-first language. Other languages are generally programming first with additions to make them able to host web. With Php, doing something besides hosting web is almost unthinkable, which has made difficult tasks in other languages easy in it. Further, it’s easy to leave open security vulnerabilities in non-php languages comparitively. (This is why Php has more difficulty with one specific thing: push notifications. Because they switch the role of server and client, which is inherently insecure. To do push notifications on Php requires doing them securely, something the other languages don’t enforce.