I started out with PHP at a very very young age and eventually moved on to other platforms (mainly Python). Not looking to question your experience - but actually recalling my own. Making a chat app was one of the first things I did. It was a super basic CRUD app mixing HTML and some code, refreshing the page every few secs, thanks to some meta tags.

Of course, it used frames, so that the "send message" part didn't clear every time it refreshed… those were the days! Eventually, my fancy chat app delivered a much better user experience, thanks to an amazing (back then!) JS library — jQuery. I built my first "API" that way! (It didn't use XML or JSON - it just returned chunks of HTML that were appended to a div).

Pure PHP gets annoying when you're dealing with complex data models, or when you're building a combination of frontend plus backend batch processing. Frameworks such as Laravel make this much much nicer to deal with IMHO. Of course, PHP is far from perfect, and its quirks can cause OCD and frustration to some people… :-)

But thanks to PHP (and also thanks to how lenient and chaotic it was), I was able to create very early on without needing to worry about software patterns (I had no clue what MVC was back then!), strict code formatting, learning how to deploy an app (just upload the code and off you go), and so on. PHP got me into programming — and it's also propelled some big-name sites and apps, so I guess it deserves some credit there as well.

Http polling came across my mind, but I always thought "No I won't do that". But in my noob mind it was full of http overhead and it must be ws like interaction. Apparently it was a thing, Facebook and a lot others use it.

And laravel, it was everything I knew. I really liked it, the orm was superb, the template engine was superb. It has it downside though, the big amount of code need to be parsed.