It is far more likely that this is from the rise of “sexier” server-side coding languages like Rust. Now I don’t know much about Rust (although I will look into it more) but I a bit of Googling on Rust vs PHP a while back and PHP is still a solid choice for a lot of things and there seem to be a lot more people out there who can code in it, making it a.good choice for FOSS projects.
That’s from 2021, what an innocent, less-enshittified time it was. These days the argument would just be pointing at the toxic dumpster fire of regular social media and shouting “how much worse do you want it to get before you leave?”.