Honest question, have there been startups which chose PHP recently?

To be even more honest, I never thought that PHP was dying, but I often thought it should not be used for new projects.

Previous job was in a very PHP-oriented company and it was just a Java alternative, the only advantage being the edit and refresh page dev cycle, and being worse in every other way. Perhaps Laravel could have changed my mind, as most devs there hated Laravel because of the magic (some then proceeded to implement control flows with typed exception throwing so maybe not the greatest bunch to discuss such things)