The compilation step, and the resulting binary, is also very useful if you need to distribute your software. As opposed to creating a ZIP file.

There are tools for creating stand-alone executables from PHP source code, but they're not as nice to use, compared to languages that were designed for this. By distributing software I also mean making your latest code live in prod.

I suppose the benefit of using PHP (or other interpreted languages) is that it's easier to create "plugins", just copy the new source files to the server.