The PHP was actually a successful endeavor. And unlike JavaScript, it complained about my sloppy semicolon use. The real friction was not the language but everything around the module I was developing.
Whenever it takes 45 minutes to get your local project up to speed, and tens of seconds to minutes for requests to complete, the feedback loop is just too slow to pretend to be productive.
Even with the friction, writing a little PHP was still the best choice. Now we’re able to react to changes as they happen instead of trying to figure them out on a schedule.