Is Golang a better choice for a MVC web application (backend) than PHP?

Personally, I say yes and no.  Every language has its pluses and minuses.  I have not done PHP in many years but know some that swear by it.  I used to do Python/Django until recently and now am doing Go with React for frontend.  Why?  Well frontend is obvious because straight JS/CSS mgmt that I do (which is more akin to what was done 15 years ago) is much worse than the cleaner/easier way of React.  Go though, mostly because it's becoming the language of choice among many I work with.  I still very much love Python/Django and see nothing wrong with using it.  So I wouldn't see anything wrong with using PHP.  The reason I'm moving to Go though is because Python threading is horrible and the types of apps I am doing require more concurrent type of logic and Go is just better at it.  It's also faster than interpretative languages like Python or PHP (though both can technically be compiled it's still not as fast as true compile type languages).  Another thing I like about go is all of the linting tools out there that help push you toward writing quality code.

Basically, do a little research on the kind of application you want to do.  Then determine if the language makes it harder to accomplish that or could cause issues in the future.  Also consider how hard it is to find people that know the language and frameworks you're choosing.  How easy/hard is it to create maintainable code? (meaning, are there tools that help push people toward quality code).

I'm sure it's not exactly the answer you wanted but I think either one will be able to get you what you want.