I think that these changes mean the death knell for PHP in any version, for small companies. There is still a place for Hack or PHP7 in very large operations, but startups, and businesses that run at smaller scale, really should walk away from PHP entirely as soon as possible.

Two reasonable directions to choose are Python Three with a framework like Flask (lighweight) or Django (heavy duty). Or go to the JVM with something like Grails framework (heavy duty) on the Groovy language. Ratpack is a lightweight framework for Groovy and there is also an interesting option to use Vaadin 8 which lets you put your GUI code into the main app rather than writing separate Javascript code.

When making your decision, be sure to consider the huge JVM ecosystem that integrates quite easily with Groovy including development tools like Jenkins and SOAPUI that can be scripted with Groovy. And the Python side also has a fairly extensive ecosystem of libraries as well.

The skill level of Python and Java/Groovy developers tends to be higher than PHP which has always attracted people who would learn just enought to get by.

The software dev community has gone through an explosion of diversity in the past 2 decades and that has enabled a lot of experimentation with new ways of doing this. There is a lot of good in this. But now we are in a period of contraction. Some of this is manifested in the spread of functional capabilities via libraries such as reactive extensions and functional features being added to languages like Java and Javascript. Another manifestation is the fading of PERL from prominence, and this is now happening to PHP as well as Ruby.

This is evolution. Embrace it or face your personal extinction as a software developer.