Have you ever tried building, deploying and maintaining Java? There is more to a language than the syntax
The modern Java ecosystem has tooling like Maven and Gradle. IDE support and static analysis in Java is more advanced as well.
As I said above, the additions are fantastic and I think they have absolutely improved the PHP experience for projects where PHP is required. But for new projects, I just do not see deploying PHP vs deploying Java with modern tooling as holding up like it may have 7-10 years ago.
I was more referring to your statement of using Java over PHP. PHP's syntax may be approaching something like Java, but the differences between the languages are still so vast, that they are only similar in syntax.
New users are automatically pushed to the new build, and users with existing sessions remain on the previous build. When I undeploy the previous build, the rest of the users start seeing the new build as well.
That's all out of the box with small config tweaks for our environment. It is truly torturous.