Do you make games? No offense intended but I would never dare program something that's going to be bashed by a 9 year old boy via Twitter
I can only think in what a game programmer feels when he's spent so much time doing something and some unknown guy paying $60 for your product says something like water doesn't look natural or hair looks too rigid and doesn't pay attention to the intricacies of your newly built engine.
I sometimes get criticized but by physicians who paid $3k - $10k for a license to our product ("You aren't a physician so you don't understand the correct workflow" or "This section is way too slow to be useful" with some "Patients may die if you don't fix this allergy reaction issue" mixed on it) who seldom worry about "looks", only about functionality.
So true! PHP statistics are always inflated because of Wordpress. Sure, it has 20% of the market but 17% is probably Wordpress and you'd end up spending more time switching skins than programming. It's very used still in newspapers and blogs and whatever site needing to show sorted entries, but it's not something you'd want to focus on if you want to grow up.
node.js is pretty cool, I spent a whole semester learning about it just to be able to compare it with ASP.NET, Django and Spring. It's limited, though, you must be building something that is I/O intensive, otherwise a miss (Uber
wrote their georeference code in Go because even though they were using node.js for other stuff it wouldn't be able to process the amount of data they required).
Regarding Java there was a lot of negative press with the Oracle license bullying. And with Google pushing Kotlin for Android and the amount of alternatives and hybrids available (React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, Flutter, etc) might hurt their mobile side, but the sheer amount of web apps still running will keep it alive for many years more. I also believe that Java was stagnating until C# gained steam (it took Java virtually
8 years to have local variable inference similar to C#'s var, 4 years to get streams to mimick LINQ, even though streams are more powerful indeed, and still no null coalescing or safe navigator operator).