Programming in PHP these days doesn't seem significantly different than programming in ASP.NET MVC or Node or maybe even Ruby. I started playing around with Laravel recently to throw up a quick site on some free hosting I have available and what tools does it require to manage the front-end: npm, bower, and gulp!
PHP may be closer to death now than ever because it's becoming less distinct as a platform.
Exactly. PHP has been "embraced and extended". The essential features of PHP I would say are easy database connectivity, and a built-in templating language.
Both of these features are now present in pretty much every server-side framework and half the client-side ones (both angular and react have it). I would argue that they're both messy, but it's there, and heavily used.
The big feature PHP still has that others are missing is the ease and cheapness of deployment. Any PHP app can be very easily deployed on shared hosting, which isn't true for ruby, asp.net, java, django or any of those. It is "more" true for asp.net and django, but not much more.
This feature is more the result of PHP easily supporting shared hosting, which is something all the others fail at pretty badly (yes, Google and Amazon have implemented it in proprietary form ... that doesn't count. Needs to be open-source, easy to implement for cheap hosters).
And really this boils down to efficiency. As ridiculous as it sounds, PHP is currently by far the most power/money efficient language. Why ? Because of thousands of cheap hosters easily implementing shared PHP hosting which usually works well, certainly well enough for the vast majority of small businesses. Ruby/Python/Go/C++/... none of them have anything like it.
Right now efficient hosting is having a "root" dns entry pointing to Google app engine, and having an ec2/other cloud app that simply checks availability of 2-3 cheap hosters and 403's to one of them. That means you effectively have very cheap bandwidth (WAY cheaper than EC2 or any other cloud hoster), yet retain the reliability/availability you need. Biggest problem is keeping database in sync.
I can't believe companies like Microsoft/Amazon are letting this opportunity slide, but they are (but of course that people use very power/cpu/money inefficient hosting kind of works to their advantage).
I think some things are connected. PHP does not have shared memory like static members. This makes it very easy to run in on clusters. No one cares if one server goes down and is replaced by another. This also makes it hard to write large systems that are supposed to run in a controlled cluster and cache things. Java and .NET are very good for those things. So PHP is good for the web hotels and Java and .NET are better for company IT/devs or any project where you can manage your servers for yourself (even if it is a cluster in Amazons or MS centers).
I'm not sure what Microsoft i letting slide, they have PHP support in Azure and .NET support (and Node etc). More expensive that the lowest cost PHP web hotels but not expensive.
PHP may be closer to death now than ever because it's becoming less distinct as a platform.