Poor performance, execution model limitations, lack of static typing (although they seem to be working on that), and general legacy cruft.

Don’t compare PHP to Node, Ruby or Python, they also have problems. I think Go is currently the best choice for a web backend; an objective evaluation of PHP and Go would certainly put Go ahead. If you know PHP, you can pick up Go in a day or two, so I don’t think that’s a great reason to keep using PHP either.

Usage statistics are a highly misleading, software projects take several years to develop and a majority will fail. Looking at current usage tells you the most popular choice from 5 years ago, not today. Over 90% of video games published in the last 5-10 years use Unity or UE4, but these probably aren’t the best choices today.

Back in the 2000s, browsers were really bad at downloading big things over slow connections since they couldn’t resume, a brief disconnect could destroy hours of progress. But I don’t think you need this anymore.

Right, but you could do the same with RPM. Not everyone is aware of this, but installing a package executes scripts with root access over your system.