I approve of the community building and I am amazed at how productive it is possible to be using modern PHP and frameworks to build websites.
But the only thing that will save PHP as a commercial language is if companies start paying PHP developers salaries on par with other modern languages. HR departments pay based on 'market rates' and those rates are simply lower for PHP.
This is because of Wordpress. Wordpress work pays less than application development typically. Writing an application with Symfony or Laravel pays market rate for an equivalent dev in your ecosystem of choice (Rails, Django, whatever).
A lot of modern languages that were touted as competitors for PHP no longer exist or never became as popular as expected, so if you value job security and don’t have the ambition to be a jack of all trades, you can just pick PHP and make sure you’re really good at that.
I don't think PHP needs "saving". PHP jobs pay less because of supply and demand. There's likely more PHP developers out there than any other language. Higher supply leads to lower salaries.
This isn't really a problem; this is one of the selling points of using PHP. PHP is a a great choice for small websites; but if you're planning on building a product or SaaS with it then it's likely not the best tool for the job. However; in those cases it's main advantage is likely that developers are cheap and abundant.
I honestly feel this is a view of the world which was once true but is now outdated. I watched some latest videos from Laracon, the annual Laravel conference, and was amazed at the excitement and the focus towards fun and making tools to help build Saas products fast.
The same could be said of any language. Most dynamic languages are roughly equivalent in the amount of skills that it takes to use, so there's obviously more to developer pricing than the language itself.
But the only thing that will save PHP as a commercial language is if companies start paying PHP developers salaries on par with other modern languages. HR departments pay based on 'market rates' and those rates are simply lower for PHP.