For more long-term business, I'd always recommend go "chosen libraries put together well" over "framework everyone knows", as the developer churn will be lower, and having more control over your design and architecture tends to be more important (and applicable) when people stick around for longer.
Herd is super neat, reminds me of XAMPP back in the day. FrankenPHP is everything I wanted out of a modern PHP web server.
And the language? Basically the same as I left it, with some nice things added. I kind of miss it :)