Rails and python aren't a step up from PHP for webservers. Both are massive steps down in terms of real world performance. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

Personally if I was "stepping up" from PHP and wasn't going to use something powerful (or didn't need all that power) I'd be stepping up into javascript and nextjs and stuff like that.

But PHP is blazing fast compared to either of those (hot code ready to accept traffic in all scenarios so we can ignore warm-up times)

I hear about Python all the time. Rarely hear about Rails now. I think the world picked one over the other.

I was at RailsConf 2022 and it was packed, even considering the strict covid rules. There were lots of people there from teams transitioning from React+Go to Rails.

GitHub & Shopify both run substantially on Rails.