It looks like you've got PHP that's embedded in your JavaScript program, and you want some sort of live updating system to change the button statuses when the data changes. When a client requests the page from the server, the server will execute the PHP code and then insert the results from the echo statements into your code. This means that all the client sees is the result of the PHP execution, like so:
let test = '10';
The client cannot execute the PHP code to do a live update; only the server can. That's why you have to refresh the page in order for the page to be updated in your case. Calling the beCareful function again will not help either, since the PHP code has already been substituted with the result when the user initially loaded up the page.
If I were you, I would refactor your code so that there's a PHP page which contains the data only. Then, perform an XMLHttpRequest from the JavaScript code to retrieve the evaluated contents of the PHP code and use that data to then set the button disabled properties as necessary. To make this update live, you'll need to wrap the request in a timer loop using setInterval:
setInterval(function() {
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.addEventListener("load", function() {
console.log(request.responseText); // This will be the response you'll get from the PHP page when you request it; use this data to set the button `disabled` attributes
});
request.open("GET", "data.php"); // Or wherever your PHP file will be
request.send();
}, 3000); // Update every 3,000 milliseconds, or 3 seconds
One step further would be to get the PHP page to serialise the data in the JSON format using the PHP json_encode command, and then get the JavaScript to deserialise this data using JSON.parse(request.responseText). That way, you can send multiple 'pieces' of data at once in a nice data structure.
Sidenote: From a security perspective, using PHP in your HTML can lead to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (XSS) being present in your code. For example, your code for the buttons contains the following PHP snippet:
<?php echo $elem['content'] ?>
The problem with this is, what happens if $elem['content'] returns user-written data? If I were able to have access to your program's editor to edit the result of $elem['content'] and set it to
sample text sample text <script>alert("Oh no! Something that wasn't meant to execute has been executed!");</script> more sample text
then your code would execute the contents of the <script> element. Though this example is mild, there could be more serious code snippets which could potentially do damage to your system (eg. perform malicious tasks on the client side, such as deleting the user's account). To solve this, use the htmlspecialchars function in PHP (see this StackOverflow answer for more details), which sanitises the given input text and aims to ensure that the text can't be written to perform an XSS attack (eg. it replaces <script> with <script>, which will still render as <script> to the user, but won't cause the code to be executed).
