I think Ernest has mentioned that he used PHP for quick prototyping and eventually plans to rebuild with something else. If you look through his post history you'll find something.
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Yeah that never happens lol
I really like Kbin and it's amazing that Ernest did pretty much everything alone, but I feel like the choice of language will eventually become a bottleneck for the project. A project of this scale needs contributors, but PHP is kind of left in the past relative to other languages, I think many people are put off by it who would otherwise contribute.
Me for instance, I'd much rather contribute to Lemmy which is in Rust and gain experience with an upcoming language, instead of learning PHP just for Kbin and then dumping that knowledge in the closet.