I mean, “best” is infinitely subjective. I would be inclined to think any anyone who says “php is the best backend software ecosystem for web” doesn’t care much about programming and are really only in the business of making money. Rust is at the creative forefront right now, it makes sense a bunch of pissed off people chose rust to make a reddit clone, it would be challenging to draw passionate engineers to a php or java project; it gives a way to draw more helpful attention (which they are as we now see squandering)

Sure you can doubt me as much as you want (and this is probably a healthy attitude). I tend to educate myself, and learn from experience (and that I dare to say, I do have...). As you may have guessed, I really recommend looking into it, there's so many good design decisions with Rust (and the ecosystem). As a starting point/library: axum would be the web-framework I'd recommend to use (as it uses Rust quite idiomatically). And for e.g. service communication via grpc, tonic is quite nice. As database abstraction layer the last time I have used sqlx which was quite convenient to use. (So far with a "classic" web-stack). And rust-analyzer is probably the best language server I have used (and felt the fast development over the time (with "successful" switch of the maintainer), which speaks for itself as well...).

Btw. it also really depends on what you actually mean with "web backend development". I.e. "just" writing a web-server that takes connections via HTTP or something deeper the stack...