What is wrong with PHP? I have tinkered with it a bit because it’s used in wordpress. I don’t know it well enough to know if or how it is garbage.
It’s a poorly designed language that started out as a way to embed bits of code inside HTML and then fell victim to its own popularity, as more and more stuff was dumped on top of it. It has no consistent underlying model, the standard library is a dangerous mess, and you need great expertise to avoid making mistakes which introduce security and reliability problems.
Sometimes (like if you’re doing Wordpress stuff) you can’t avoid it. But any time you can, you should.
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What language to learn really depends on the field you want to apply your coding skills to.
If you just want to get a general feel of coding, then python and julia are good places to start. Python is the old and slow one that everyone sort of understand because it is almost like pseudo code. Julia is the new one that claims to be much quicker and fancier. They are both hot in the field of deep neural network programming, although python still has the much larger user base.
Pornhub uses a PHP backend, or they did at least. Depends on what you consider soul-crushing or garbage. Testing your changes would get exhausting after a minute or two, I imagine.
From what I heard you need to study coding in university.
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I can teach you HTML right now. These are the tags you need:
div (invisible structures used to organize the website into different parts)
h1 through h6 (headings)
p (paragraph text)
ul (bullet point)
ol (numbered bullet point)
a (link)
button
img (image)
Now just Google how to structure the above HTML code (kind of hard for me to type it out here).
Now you know HTML!
I’m a freelance web developer myself. It’s a good career if you already have good design skills or at least a good eye for it, otherwise you’ll have to rely on other people for the design portion.
I use either Webflow or Duda for my web development projects. You don’t need to write any code in either. Webflow gives you more precise control over the HTML and CSS so you can build any website you can imagine, while Duda is easier to use but doesn’t give you as much control. Don’t mess with WordPress or cPanel.
I recommend you start with Duda especially if you’re not that familiar in HTML and CSS concepts. They have a lot of support for freelancers, such as built-in client management and client billing features.
You can worry about learning HTML and CSS later on. When that time comes, I’d recommend Treehouse.
It’s true that you’d be competing with people in India who would be willing to work for US$25/hr. But hey, guess what? You’d also be competing with people in the US who need to charge a lot more because cost of living is higher, so you have an advantage over them.
Most US web developers charge $65-$90/hr for basic websites, but I can charge less because I live in Taiwan. I charge $50/hr.
I then charge between $50-100/month for hosting, maintenance, and management, which makes for some nice (mostly) passive income.
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Not true at all.
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I’m self-taught
It seems to be common these days - as it was in the 50s thru 70s - to draw no distinction between “coding” and software engineering. The latter draws in all of the foundational principles of engineering-in-general.
Anyone can learn to code. To learn how to use code to build things in a robust manner, using proven design patterns that will work in production and that other engineers will understand, is something rather different. I’m not sure how well these skills are taught at university these days, though.
Plenty of materials to learn from. The university gives you 4 years to learn system design, design patterns, DS, algos, etc. But only top students really get it at the end. There is a lot of mentoring on the job too.
Oh, definitely. If you get someone who really knows their craft to talk you through it when you’re just starting out, that can help enormously. I was lucky in that regard. Unfortunately, a lot of what goes on must be the blind leading the blind.
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TBH a lot of what goes on in my freelance web dev business is copy and paste. 
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There’s a brand of computer power supply in Taiwan called snake eats elephant.
They probably copied all their designs from Delta.
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I always liked Sparkle Power brand, which sounds cool until you think about it for a moment!
(Actually they make quite good units, they’re one of the many subsidiaries of FSP Group.)
You forgot the blink tag. Wow, 2021 was a long time ago. I was fully planning to get a BS in CS before I realized AI was going to cut the legs out from under the job market. I know there will always, or for the immediate future, be a need for fingered intelligences, but with the number losing jobs at that time and projecting the need for coders into the future, I decided to go deeper into what I know rather than changing foci late in life. So far, so good.
I think AI (and technology in general) will replace many tedious/labor-intensive jobs, the least of which will be Computer Science related.
In any case, I believe we are not far from a future where there will be less available jobs than there are humans. Hopefully that means humans will be required to work less while automatically receiving the material benefits of working (ie food, shelter, etc.) from AI/technology.
I think that, one day, websites will be all machine code, and the people who now know php, css, etc. will be the ones doing the finger work to design them using whatever tools are developed. It won’t be freshers like I would have been had I continued that path. Sometimes, you have to admit that you’re too old. I still want to get the basics so I can understand well enough to use AI-based tools, but it won’t be a career for me.