I think it is a mistake to conflate the success of the Wordpress ecosystem (and its plugins) with the success of PHP. Just because Wordpress is popular as a CMS does not mean that the developers of Wordpress plugins would choose PHP otherwise.
It's also not a contest? I'm not sure why people care about these numbers. PHP keeps getting bashed because it's a bad programming language full of footguns, then and now, regardless of whether or not other programming languages exist.