Four words : composer, symfony, laravel and php-fig.

The php ecosystem is not what it was 4 years ago. Although due to backward compatibility the languages still has a lot of cruft. But this means old code often works directly with the last version and benefits from its performance improvement.

If your new project is about receiving an http request and send a response like a REST API I think it is a good tool for the job. If you want long lived process (kafka/rabbitmq consumers for example) or sockets it is possible to do it in php but you'll have a better experience with other stacks.