“shill” implies payment, Lemmy is just way too under the radar for that kind of engagement
And by the time you have shills the network will be drowned in LLMs already. The latter hasn’t happened, it’s pure paranoia to think the former is anything to be concerned with.
Because it wasn’t php proper, it was an interpreter for PHP and Hack (their own language), and since 2019 they cut off PHP anyway
Also it’s mostly because the vast majority of those “70% of websites” that use PHP are wordpress installs, and wordpress never switched to the HHVM.