I think it would be worth mentioning GraalVM and https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby in competitors section.
It passed and landed in PHP 8.0.
If you benchmark JIT PHP vs PHP with no opcache you will see 500% speed up or more depending on the workload.
Of course most PHP web servers tend to be pretty IO bound. The project I work on sees ~a 20% in best case response time which is quite nice.