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I'm not sure that's true. It seems very popular in OSS in general but not much enterprise/commercial uptake.

I guess node has taken some market share it seems like

Nah. There is legacy, then there is the (now dying) wordpress/drupal/<php-cms> shops that still run PHP. Custom apps are not done in PHP, unless its a (usually) unskilled dev who knows no better.

With AI, there is little need for PHP in 2026, even for the novice dev. The onl thing PHP had in the early 2000s was the FTP deployment story, but that has long faded. I van deploy a go binary WAY easier than a PHP application.

What else is using it and popular? Mediawiki - that's true. And some forums, but forums aren't popular any more.

Nextcloud, the mentioned Roundcube, plenty non-Wordpress CMSs, many internal tools I work with daily...

No way. Forums are still incredibly popular. Something like RedFlagDeals has an entire business based around their forum and get close to 40m page views per month and more than 3m uniques.

And there are at least 3 other hugely popular php based forums that I occasionally check — and those are just for my own niche interests.

I've never heard of RedFlagDeals. I have heard of Twitter.

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