Also likewise to the team, kudos to the people who built Castopod
On Linux, production multi-PHP deployment is dead-simple thanks to the excellent DEB.SURY.ORG (for DEB based distros) and REMI (for RPM based distros) repos. It's also more common to deploy PHP via PHP-FPM and Nginx nowadays. Homebrew does a decent job on macOS too, multi-PHP deployment is also easy when coupled with Nginx/PHP-FPM. For Windows I have no idea but as long as you got XAMPP and MAMP, well :) Lots of Docker based solutions too like LocalWP (not just for WP), Lando, Laragon, DDEV to name a few.
There's also excellent support in editors/IDEs, either by default (in JetBrain's PHPStorm, Nova, KDevelop or Kate Editor) or via plugins for VSCode, Sublime Text, Atom and others.
Not specific to 7, but 2 things I think have helped a lot are:
* PSR standards * composer packaging
Initial PSR work helped define some package interop standards. I'm not sure how useful ongoing PSR work today is (no doubt there's some incremental benefits?).
Composer is a great package manager, and helped usher in a lot more sharing/reusability of common components.
Laravel bundles a number of Symfony components, for example (many frameworks do).
The speed alone in 7 was big, and we've seen some more incremental improvments in 8 and 8.1 and 8.2. It's hard to find current benchmarking tools that compare the 5 series with 7 and 8. I found one showing 5->7 on a mandelbrot run.
* PHP 5.0 was 251s
* PHP 5.1 was 87s
* PHP 5.6 was 29s
* PHP 7.0 was 15s
* PHP 7.1 was 9s
The 'experimental JIT' work (at that time) yielded 4s.
That benchmark was from 2016, so... way out of date now, but other numbers I've seen were 7.1->7.4 was another ... 10% improvement on average, and depending on workload, you might see another 10-20% improvement from 7.4->8.0.
Kinsta has some interesting useful benchmarks on 'real world' apps
https://kinsta.com/blog/php-benchmarks
Been using PHP since 1996, and ecosystem, community, performance all continuously improve year over year.