My experience: coming from programming in C, then doing web-scripting with Perl, then PHP 4 through 5, 7 and 8 versions, it's been delightful. Big improvements in speed, ecosystem, very nice backwards compatibility in general (which is hard to do), and keeps being a flexible, multi-paradigm language. About frameworks, you can do things now like-ruby-on-rails with Laravel, like-java with Symfony, or just use any custom solution you see to fit better for team/yourself. Mantra: you can do shit code with any language, and PHP is flexible enough to let you organize projects the right way.

With all the stuff Facebook has made, PHP also has gotten a JIT on the standard package, I would stay it is fast enough, easily outperforming anything one would do in Python or Ruby.

If you care about performance in Webapps while using dynamic languages, it is pretty much PHP or nodejs, at least until CPython and Ruby MRI JITs improve.

I would have added VB.NET, but it isn't going anywhere nowadays.

Fast if done properly, we serve around 1k rps under 50ms.

Slow. Its faster than in PHP5 era, but benchmarks usually are misleading. Eg PHP does "less" making it faster for SOME tasks. If you include all unicode parsing, error handling etc PHP is still very slow.

Take Go as an alternative. Has unicode etc but still lots faster than PHP.

Yes, it has come quite a ways in the last decade. Maybe you should take it for a spin

It's decent enough with opcocode cache, preloading etc but not amazing.

I haven't try things like FrankenPhp though.