Was it ever a bad idea, or did it just go out of fashion? I'm not a PHP fan, but I miss the simplicity of low-end deployments on a LAMP stack by literally dragging files over FTP. It seems like something has been lost with the total embrace of more modern web frameworks.
It's just a difference in scale. I mean, you can still setup a FTP and drag and drop your files to deploy, if you want to. But companies with many developers deploying multiple changes per day, needs something that works better and faster. Not saying that serverless is for them, but that's why things get more complex sometimes. But you're still able to choose "older" things.
Definitely, I guess I just miss having a platform (LAMP) that scaled down as well as up. I think it's really cool that some of the most trafficked websites run WordPress and MediaWiki which can also be installed in a few clicks on a $5/month shared host. I recently wrote a Python web app that uses Dynamodb and Lambda and even though it's open source it feels way less portable.
Yeah. PHP may be out of fashion, but it's still powering a massive portion of the internet because this deployment model is so lightweight. Much different than the now-popular model of "spin up an app server and reverse proxy to it".
