Sure, the serious use case is a VM or Docker or etcetera-virtual based solution. However I must have a couple dozen maintenance-mode projects on my system and there's a certain appeal to alt-tabbing from MS Excel or Photoshop to a console window and typing `service start foo` (or the launchd equivalent).

There are still a gazillion people using WAMP (and so on) as a bad impersonation of their production environment, so this fills a role.