PHP is in decline, and rightly so. I don't understand this urge of holding on to PHP with a panicked iron grip when there are so many better languages, regardless of which metrics one happens to care about. Whatever
I still use it all the time. It's like saying sqlite, grep or awk is in decline. I'm sorry people do stupid things with tools that are easy to use but that's how it is.
I use php in a bunch of places I don't really care about. And if told you about them, you wouldn't either. That's why it's a great fit.
It's not about the language itself, it's about the whole ecosystem around PHP. You have battle tested solutions for everything. And PHPStan is just the cherry on the cake for every old/new PHP project.
"PHP is in decline" or "PHP is dead" can be happily ignored. People saying this based on “data” pulled out of someone else's butt. This is going on since almost 10 years, and it is wrong since ever. PHP is chugging along just fine and will do this for the coming decades. PHP is in this regard the COBOL of the web.
I use php in a bunch of places I don't really care about. And if told you about them, you wouldn't either. That's why it's a great fit.
dumb and stupid is sometimes a great answer.