Granted I don’t know much about typing in php, but from my quick google search, it seems like they support type hints and type declarations, but the language isn’t strongly typed.
Also, to your second point, some of the largest, most critical, and most at-risk businesses on the planet (namely banks) run on COBOL, but I wouldn’t exactly describe cobol as a language that lends itself well to large orgs, it’s just entrenched. same as php and dozens of other technologies.
I admit I’ve only ever used Hack, not vanilla PHP, but that one is a pleasure to use. I’m sure the vast majority of my colleagues will agree with that too
Personally,I don’t think php or js are the right tools to build a backend for a business.
Neither are particularly friendly towards growing teams for many reasons, but the lack of strong typing is a big one.
You want your backend to have minimal complexity, that’s why go has been so popular lately