despite it's pre 1.0 status it's arguably more production ready than php ever was/will-be etc.
I see no reason to start any greenfield project in 2019 in PHP unless you literally only know or ever want to learn PHP. I could be wrong in terms of the entire language and it's ecosystem could have changed in the 18-20 years since I deliberated interacted with it last... We have a lot of things since mod php, so there's many other options, most of which don't involve PHP, so I suppose true fans will build their web apps in forth, I dunno...