No. If we're talking about tech debt (that's not what parent was talking about by the way) then JS is a magnitude worse. Running old projects from JS ecosystem can require multiple miracles, not only code refactoring.
And your example, codeigniter, is one of the worst examples in PHP.
Nobody said js wasn't worse, just that your experience is not the experience of most PHP upgrades.
Saying Code Igniter is not used in a lot of places because of Google trends is wrong for a lot of reasons, but the biggest of which being your graph shows laravel and codeigniter neck and neck a decade ago. Who cares whether new projects are started in code igniter? PHP is mostly legacy apps, and there are other frameworks with similar nightmare stories.
Again, JS is bad too, but we have to completely rewrite sites due to some PHP framework upgrades because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.
I have no idea what you're referring to with your distinction between tech debt and server upgrades. I'm talking about server upgrades, clearly. I'm just saying if you upgrade PHP on an old project chances are things will break. This happens with Laravel and Slim too.
Then it sounds like we disagree on what the thread is about. When I hear "I updated PHP and everything broke" I think "because libraries break between version upgrades." You seem to be arguing against a position that people aren't taking, which is that there's something inherently wrong with PHP as a language that makes it break when upgraded (which nobody has said).
The same goes for Node, which doesn't break servers just because you upgrade it. I have updated from 12 to 20 with no problems because of the dependencies.
> Again, JS is bad too, but we have to completely rewrite sites due to some PHP framework upgrades because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.
I even quoted this part specifically in my reply:
> because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.
You misunderstand me, I'm saying it has as much to do with PHP as it has to do with JS. Node doesn't break on upgrade because of JS, it breaks because of dependencies that don't work on new versions, as does PHP.
And your example, codeigniter, is one of the worst examples in PHP.
Not only it is a framework that has minor usage: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=codeigniter,larav...
It is infamous for being hard to upgrade. No responsible PHP developer would start a complex project in it today.
A typical PHP project in the last years use either Laravel or Symfony.
Not to mention PHP has mature tooling to perform automated code upgrade between versions: https://github.com/rectorphp/rector
The project I mentioned was 4 years old and so far no code change was required between PHP 7.2 and PHP 8.3.
And again, my parent was clearly talking about server upgrade: "was alway easier just to build a new server".
And the change I had to do was not even multiple lines, it was a single line in a Dockerfile. I found the Pull Request and it was from 7.4 to 8.3:
https://i.imgur.com/MmemYSp.png