PHP the language has become pretty nice, but I recently had to work with a PHP CMS deployment, and it was an absolute pain to do. PHP frameworks seem to still exist in a world where you manually upload code to a manually configured server running apache. Dockerizing the CMS (uses Symfony) is/was an absolute pain.
I have never had a good experience with a Debian server. Every single time I had to add unstable or third party repos to get anything remotely current to run. What’s the point if you have to add unstable shit anyway?