The tone of this article (plus my experience on indeed) suggests that a lot of these roles are for larger companies, not for little companies who are suddenly online and need a FT/PT web dev.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a shift in job listing behavior that caused a sudden influx of php job listings on indeed. So it isn’t as if the jobs didn’t exist before, they just weren’t posted on Indeed.

The salaries discussed (77k) doesn’t suggest that a surge in demand is pushing up pay.