Back when I was still coding PHP on Windows, I just used the XAMPP bundle to get the entire web stack up and running in minutes. Granted, that was 10 years ago, I'm neither coding PHP nor coding on Windows now, so I'm a bit out of the loop.
Surely I'm not the only person who has worked on PHP application that needed to stay running while it was being converted, piece by piece, to ASP.NET? Of course these days with dotnet Core this can all be done on Linux or the traffic routing can be trivially handled by nginx...
I'm trying to think of an answer to "We've got to do this on Windows!" but nothing realistic is coming to mind that doesn't involve legacy-ware that is over ten years old -- which is still beyond the scope of this general discussion.
Surely I would think that "PHP on Windows" going forward would be a feature delivered from WSL and not on Windows itself.
Windows server vm, IIS, PHP 7, and sql server. This replaced an asp app.
My only major issues were SQL driver or coding. I did struggling with session timeouts for a while.
I really wish I had known about nginx back then. Even if it were just to show a "down for maintenance" screen while doing a release.
Edit: I upgraded to php 7 in early 2016 before the app officially launched