Laravel. I have no particular love for PHP, but Laravel just "gets it right" and understands the needs of a web developer. After years of working with Python/NodeJS (Flask/Express), Laravel was like a key that fit a lock. The ecosystem of paid plugins and services around it are really well built as well.
I've always said that frameworks, tools, ecosystem, libraries, community, etc are far, far, far more important than the programming language.
Also, nowadays PHP is not 10 year's ago PHP, same as nowadays's JavaScript is not 10 year's ago JavaScript. They're both "ok" languages to me.
And yes, having used for many years Django, some playing with Rails on the side, and then everything under the sun for Node, I 100% agree Laravel is freaking awesome and I really wish I had discovered it earlier.
I started my development career on at the tail end of the Ruby on Rails craze and in the middle of the JS framework explosion. I've always wanted to learn Ruby, but it always seems to me that it would just be learning it for learning's sake and not for any professional development. It's unfortunate, because the little Ruby I did learn, I enjoyed.
Ruby on rails still hasn't peaked yet so I'm not sure what you mean by the tail end. Rust micro services might be the new trend for big tech but there would be more rails apps in development now than there ever has been.
We are writing microservices in .NET. I don't quiet like using Go since it is very verbose and it's more time consuming compared to C# to accomplish anything. Performance wise, .NET is as good as Go.
I would see Go being more usable for DevOps tasks, writing pipelines, programming infrastructure and such.
If performance would be the most important thing, then I would consider Rust.
If you are really paying attention to the hype train, I think Rust has more energy and blog posts behind it at the current moment. Golang probably gets more use like ruby on rails does.
If you are actually really really paying attention to the hype train, Next.js is actually the trendiest app development tool. Go is a bit more infra and Rust more niche performance cases.
This is more accurate, where I work we are a predominantly ruby shop actively using JRuby in production for a number of years, though in the last year or so we have been adding Go based RPC servers in addition to our Ruby RPC servers. We've been converting over the simple ones that are utilized the most (mainly reads) and ones that have logic that won't change often.
But day to day I use JRuby and Go quite often, and in the process of converting some Ruby code over to Go, for specific performance, dependency and memory reasons.
