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> It also doesn’t scale well for the size of modern web communities.
I guess this would be more of an architecture question, rather than one of the runtime itself.
There are many sites out there that scale decently that are running on slow or sometimes slower runtimes than PHP, like Python (the Django framework comes to mind) or Ruby (the Ruby on Rails framework comes to mind). For example, consider the following: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&l=z... (disclaimer: sometimes benchmarks contain pretty optimized code, but here I'm selecting for the more idiomatic and boring ones)
Someone mentioned Wikipedia and WordPress being PHP, I'll also mention Instagram and Spotify using Python and GitHub and GitLab using Ruby. If your app is architected well, then performance of any of these runtimes (or others) can be good enough, though of course one can also talk about some of the benefits of needing less resources to do more (e.g. with Go, Java or .NET, or even Rust).
Though admittedly, PHP is also popular in shared hosting, which might give it a bad reputation due to the architectures typically employed there (single server with single instance) and security has indeed been a topic in the public eye, especially because PHP was easy to get started with, which lead to a lot of projects by devs that weren't skilled.