Rosaly.com (shameless plug) , the team of developer is 32 years old average, though we all come from different background and all used python/go/java/rust in some of our previous jobs or on our own opensource projects, we just want to get shit done.

  * it has its quirks but we know them and each newer version fix more of them.
  * its damn fast (more than python or ruby)
  * its type system is better than python (trait/interface , union type <3 , and now intersection type ! ) 
  * symfony/laravel have evolved over the last 10 years, most of the things you knew 10 years ago are still true now

and as a result it tends to attract people with the same mentality, my experience with recruiting php developer is that you have a much clearer clivage of "wordpress website maintainer" and "people who want to get shit done"

you will not find for example "genius developer, that write code faster than you think, who writes all his project in rust but is now thinking to switch to haskell and will leave your company as soon as it find a company that use it"

If you ignore things like Wordpress, my guess is that today it's often used by organizations whose flagship product was originally written more than a decade ago, back when PHP was the go-to language for web development (see: Facebook, Wikipedia, Tumblr etc.) and now that there's an ecosystem around this flagship product, new projects/services may as well be started in PHP, because that's what everyone is comfortable/familiar with. Otherwise, it looks like PHP isn't a very popular choice nowadays for new projects, especially if it's a new company.

Take our company for example, our flagship web product was developed more than a decade ago, and, well, today we still use PHP, because rewriting everything in a different language is a gargantuan task. It's not only about the language itself, but also about all the tooling/best practices etc. around it, which you have to replace, and it's costly. We do gradually modernize our code to remove all the PHP5-era warts, and it's much easier to accomplish than switch to a different language entirely. Modern PHP7+ with Symfony is very pleasant to work with, and in my opinion, from the productivity standpoint, there's really no reason to switch to anything else. Also, PHP7+ seems to be faster than Python/Ruby in raw interpreter speed. However, we realized that we can't scale further if we stay with our PHP/Symfony monolith for everything because of Symfony's considerable startup overhead, so we now try to write new services in Go (request processing is usually 10 times faster for our loads), and seems like the combo PHP+Go is very popular among PHP developers in general.

So, I'd say, PHP isn't "dead" and is still widely used in 2021, however, in my opinion, its usage is indeed dwindling, because there seems to be a trend even in our own PHP community to gradually supplement/replace/augment parts of our projects with services written in Go, and PHP is more and more frequently equaled to "legacy"/"monolith".

In August I did database related consulting for a client which is building a large CRUD'ish application in Laravel. I was intrigued with their decision and they said the tech stack was chosen based on speed of iteration and developer availability.

Everyone.

Considering just WordPress powers something like 40% of the whole www, I'd say quite a few people!

I use PHP for my personal sites.

Me.

all my projects using PHP ¯\_(ツ)_/¯