I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested PHP is dead. People may want it to be dead, but it's probably still the most-used language on the web!

Sorry, not sorry—PHP is alive, and thriving! The language runtime is getting ever faster, the packagist ecosystem in combination with composer (PHP's package manager) are rock-solid, there are event loops and application servers by now, serverless deployments are the default operation mode, and with Laravel or Symfony, there are trusted and extremely versatile frameworks available that do stuff out of the box that require lots of manual efforts with other languages.

Add to that the support for type annotations that can go all the way from fully untyped and dynamic, to runtime-enforced primitive constraints and object types, and you'll end up with a very good choice for web applications that evolve quickly.