Hey @henrysblog,
having a look at your TOP 10 PHP sites, I am a little bit confused:
TOP 1 I'am not sure if it is worth to be mentiond as a TOP 1 (you can still use JAVA or Perl to implement such Services)
TOP 2 says, PHP supports a lot of DBs. Keep in mind that you or you'r hoster needs to enable that support, it does not work out of the box (no one of them). MySQL is enabled for the most, IMHO.
TOP 3 is quiet a cool one. But I don't know why that makes PHP so cool. I would have mentioned, that you can quickly start to improve big Systems while learning PHP, that would be a benefit by choosing PHP :)
TOP 4 same as TOP 3
TOP 6 has some bad facts: While the raw Code is uploaded, and many Systems Needs it to be writeable (Auto updates in WordPress bspw.) PHP is hackable. The attacker just Needs to get Access and then can start to modify the source Code. That is a bad aspect on the raw sourcecode. The good Thing is, you can Code PHP using a Basic Editor :)
TOP 7 many programming languages do have a garbage collector
TOP 8 Yes, coding PHP could be fast. But I'am not sure what you mean by "easier to scale"? (Really, would be nice to read about that part)
TOP 9 same as TOP 8
TOP 10 Not all (even in 2018) Hosting Providers do Support PHP. That of Course is a shame o.O
I did not read your whole article. I think it is a Little bit Long for a kick off, dont you think so?