Honestly excited about this, I am one of those people that really love PHP from the old days and I still use it from time to time to build small web apps and api's. I don't get the hate that PHP usually gets, I've always kinda liked it.
These days I mostly program in C, CAPL and Python but I would love to build apps in PHP.
Totally agree, modern PHP is quite fun.
I kinda hope PHP would adopt java-like types for strings etc, to somewhat clean up the mess of its functions, e.g for strings - instead of str_contains, strtr, substr_compare you can do $myString->contains("test");
https://github.com/nikic/scalar_objects provides it as a plugin, but its not fully fleshed out.