I think it depends on the types of project or the target of the said project.

Recently I had to develop a very small CMS that manages personal web pages and it was a requirement that it could be installed very easily (i.e., by copying a single file) on virtually any hosting provider. PHP was (and is) still the natural candidate for such projects.

"so many new and established options that are better in almost everyway"

such as?

C# (optionally using the ASP.NET framework) running on the fast, efficient, cross-platform .NET Core.

Or Java/Scala/Kotlin. Or Go. Or Python. Or Node + Typescript.

If my project is "big enough" to warrant something like Laravel, I would just pick Rails or Phoenix over it any day. I find both those languages much better to work in and I just feel like I'm getting things done way faster. If its smaller than that, I'dd definitly just pick go or node with express or go maybe.

I work with PHP 5 days a week through work and even a few years into it, i still do not like it. Its feels like a mess compared to the other languages I work with for my own projects. Even when working with something like Laravel which do mask a bunch of the pain points of the language, it still feels cumbersome IMO.

well, that's your biggest problem. PHP 5 is a steaming pile of dung when compared to PHP 7.

you can run PHP pretty much anywhere, even the cheapest VPS probably has PHP, as well as all managed hosting. For python, go or other languages it can be more tricky if you're looking for cheap hosting / VPS

With docker containers and the numerous PaaS/FaaS runtimes, does that really matter? You can run anything just about anywhere these days, cheaply or even for free.

For us techies, no, it doesn't really matter.

For average business owners who buy a WordPress template and some 5€ hosting in order to set up a business card web site on their own, on the other hand, it matters a lot. So if your project targets that group of people then PHP is pretty much the only option; anything more complicated than an FTP upload/MySQL import is pretty much to advanced for them and they generally aren't interested in learning new skills just to get a web site online.

Who's doing that anymore? Either you (or your staff) are technical enough to manage installing a web framework on a server, or you use any of the numerous managed sites instead. (Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Wordpress.com, Shopify, Facebook, etc)

The last thing a non-techie business owner needs is to worry about setting up a random server with bad PHP code.

There's plenty of businesses selling business card web sites built on WordPress. They usually install it on whatever hosting the customer orders and then leaves the rest up to the customer.

Yes it matters. This is often unessecary maintenance overhead.

A docker container is more overhead than managing your own VPC?

Just came here to say this.