In reply to Steve Grant.

I started off writing vanilla JS, but I’m really not in love with the modern JS toolchain, NPM based, huge libraries, build steps and transpilers. I find it a real unpleasant time consuming and unpredictable chore, confused, ugly, opaque, ever changing, demanding of maintenance. And the modern WP sits perched on that, with its own walls moving all the time.

Having worked in PHP to build basic apps, I find JavaScript significantly more approachable. It has nothing to do with the language, but the community. Frankly, for every 100 online courses on Javascript, you'll find one good PHP course. Good luck even finding new developers get excited about PHP, or even a bootcamp for PHP.

And companies will find it a lot easier to find Javascript developers building WordPress apps rather than PHP developers.

Is the future Javascript? According to the numbers, yes.

Sorry if this isn't the answer you want. But as you mentioned, ACF does have a neat set of tools to still use your PHP skillset to build Gutenberg blocks.