As someone who's been making websites since 1993, everything you said here has made me twitch in one way or another. I've been a ColdFusion team lead, a PHP developer and I used to write DHTML scripts.

Also RIP to separation of concerns on the frontend (document [html], style [css] and behavior [js]) since it's all buried in javascript nowadays.

Given that Wordpress can be targeted as an API for a SPA and Laravel is pretty hot, I'd say PHP isn't a bad choice.

ColdFusion of course is pretty out of vogue, but places like Invision like it still.

A better comparison would be with ASP 3 or Perl.

Sigh. Working in cybersecurity, it makes me sad to see how much ColdFusion is still in use, full of security holes that no one will fix because the original developers have long since moved on and current developers don't want to touch anything CF related with a ten foot pole.

1999 saw the release of XMLHttpRequest as an ActiveX control for IE 5. There certainly were IE-focused developers still referring to most of what they were doing as DHTML and yet doing the earliest AJAX stuff, back when the X still made sense that it stood for XML and XMLHttpRequest was the first and at the time only AJAX tool available in a web developer's toolbelt.