In my consulting work, I’ve worked with a wide range of developer-focused tools.
WordPress, React, Vue, Next, HTMX, PHP, Python, Rails, Java, .NET, a variety of static site generators, and more.
I can pretty confidently state that modern tools (render-all-the-things-in-JavaScript libraries like Vue and React) are worse than legacy approaches.
Don’t get me wrong: npm install can be a much easier initial setup than trying to install a DB and connect a PHP install to it (but often, it isn’t).