Thanks to pressure from HHVM I assume. Nothing was happening in the PHP language for freaking three years.
To be fair the benchmarks usually take a wordpress or drupal installation and do a requests per second measurement, which IMO is a real world benchmark.
No hate, I just don't get why hhvm doesn't get any love for what they did. Maybe because from HPHPc to HHVM they seriously gave the PHPc a competition and people kind of got mad.
https://kinsta.com/blog/the-definitive-php-7-final-version-h...