In addition to PHP itself undergoing a lot of good optimizations a lot of tooling and frameworks have come a long way as well. Composer and most modern framewor

In addition to PHP itself undergoing a lot of good optimizations a lot of tooling and frameworks have come a long way as well. Composer and most modern frameworks play much nicer in the ecosystem and it is quick and easy to get something up and running which gives access to most of the things you'd need in a webapp. I'm a big fan of Laravel personally but there's plenty of other great options nowadays.