You also had facebook pumping resources into PHP with HPHPc, HHVM, trying to compile a spec, etc. That definitely would have helped keep PHP alive through the

You also had facebook pumping resources into PHP with HPHPc, HHVM, trying to compile a spec, etc. That definitely would have helped keep PHP alive through the period between PHP 5 and PHP 7. Additionally, PHP's releases of 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 introduced enough new functionality that the bump was more than incremental. It had backwards-breaking changes, which should have warranted a new major release if PHP followed semver.