IMO Some stuff is great of course but things like their planned JIT additions (which effectively make PHP faster at calculations, which few people use PHP for) and type enforcement (in a dynamic language with no compile step) seems to really miss the mark of what makes PHP great and so widely usable.
I know this is meant as an insult but it's a poor one. There are programming languages features out there that are good on their own merits and PHP is incorporating those features. If they also happen to also exist in Java, or C++, or Haskell then they do. Adding those features might make a language more like X because X also has that feature but that doesn't mean it's the goal.
In many ways PHP does things better than Java by virtue of having hindsight on how those features exist in other languages. The way PHP handles nullable types is better than both Java and C#.
PHP JIT is intended to reduce latency and large codebase start-up delay, two biggest problems of modern PHP as for me. It's not about calculations.
I have some patches to improve the DOM API extension for example, simplify its usage which would make it much simpler to use.
I have not need to create a class to encapsulate a GET request parameter in PHP. In Java it was common the last time I used it.