most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project
Is this really true?
I used to be a full-time PHP developer but I personally don't touch that language anymore. But it's still very popular around the world, I've seen multiple projects start this year use PHP, because that's the language the founders/most developers in the company are familiar with. Probably depends a lot on where in the world you're located.
Last Stack Overflow survey had ~20% of the people answering the survey saying that they still use PHP in some capacity.