No other language can even come close.
No other language can even come close.
I mean I get it. It's obviously a counter-reaction to all the PHP hate that has been with every PHP thread for 2 decades, and much of it has been unfair, especially for the last 5 or so years. But please let's not swing the pendulum all the way to the other side.
For example, PHP is complicated enough that people use WAMP/MAMP.exe just for local development.
I think that advantage may have been real at one time, when FTP deploys were a thing. The myth loves on. Folks that chant this praise are often not be the same folks that have to maintain the webserver side of things, though.
Easy to deploy looks like this: ./foobar --port=80 > Listening on port 80, ready for traffic
That could be Go, could be Rust. But not PHP.
PHP webserver / application separation does bring some advantages - for example if you bring your application to a corrupted state or crash it, it will go and die. Recovery is, well "implied". But deployment wise, no.
It actually seems to be a LOT harder to run PHP that at first blush. Take this example: https://github.com/laravel/valet/issues/290
Turns out if you php-fpm app one Tuesday at 15:43 starts to write more than 4k to stderr (maybe it writes some nice verbose logs after being hit by some recoverable error), you will find yourself wondering what does "upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream" imply while your endpoint responds with 502. This is just one possible footgun .. ekhm .. tuning option.
And for modern development environments, deployment complexity usually comes from managing virtualized hardware and CI/CD pipelines, which is independent of whatever language your app is written in.
Nowadays with something like Heroku or App Engine, language has almost no impact on ease of deployment, and even custom deployments are pretty easy once you've practiced the docker/systemd script + apache/nginx proxy dance once or twice.