I work mostly in the "webshit" and mobile industry. The last time, in a work context, that I saw a site (in this case, from a vendor) and went "goddamn, for what it's doing, that is fast, this is really nice to use!" it turns out it was... PHP running on some normal-ass single instance VM or server somewhere, serving mostly just HTML.
It's really a spectacular outlier how well-optimized PHP is contrasted to how poorly designed the actual language is.
Thank Facebook for that. Likely, more specifically, Andrei Alexandrescu.
Not universally, no. For instance, C programmers are harder to find than Python coders, and the farther back you go the harder it is to find good people (COBOL, Fortran). The newer the tech, the more people there are riding in on the hype train to choose from.