We recently picked PHP for a large web application. The usual choices at our teams are Java11, Golang, and Typescript (+ a few teams that use Kotlin, C# and Rust). Many team members however also had experience with PHP in their career, but the main reason for us to pick PHP was Laravel's ecosystem really. The amount of features and scaffoldings that you get out of the box is just crazy. It gives you proper authentication for both web and APIs with 2FA and everything out of the box. Plus billing integration with recurring billing support and everything you need for payments, and also team management features ready in 5mins. And then you add another package for building administration panels (it's called Laravel Nova) which costs nothing comparing to alternatives for Java and deliveries much better development experience. It has been almost a year and no regrets so far.

I think it easily saves you 6 months of development time if you want to build a web app or a website beyond a static page. The ecosystem is very stable and reliable. So why not?

I encourage you to watch some of the introduction videos that they produce to show their ecosystem. That's how we were convinced to start investigating it. We spent a couple of weeks to make everyone productive with it. We had to catch up with all PHP7+ features and read Laravel docs. I think we will still build a lot with Java and Golang, but not for WEB. I don't see a better alternative for building web apps or front-end projects.

We don't however mention it in our portfolio or even on our job listing. It's apparently not cool for a publicly traded enterprise to say that we also use PHP.