You would also need a properly configured Apache server wouldn't you? I can see the ease of deployment argument in the context of old-school shared hosting prov

You would also need a properly configured Apache server wouldn't you? I can see the ease of deployment argument in the context of old-school shared hosting providers, but nowadays how is starting a PHP application any harder than Rails or Django for example. And for modern development environments, deployment complexity usually comes from managing virtualized hardware and CI/CD pipelines, which is independent of whatever language your app is written in.