Hi @steve84
We are a tiny company with only three employees from Germany. The last few years we had mainly used WordPress and CraftCMS. Since the middle of last year we have been using NextJS for most projects with either an existing database structure (e.g. WordPress API) or all new ones with Strapi.
The greatest advantages of this combination are the flexibility and reusability of individual components, even across projects. Today, we have become faster overall, just like in the past.
On the technical side we also have a few advantages. For smaller pages without a News system we like to use SSG for the frontend and host the pages completely static. The static files we can easily host e.g. via AWS S3. Of course there are many other providers.
The availability of already existing React components for most cases, the easy integration as PWA, the possibility to send push messages, the performance and the easy handling of CI/CD were the decisive factors in the end.
You must or should rethink the deploying because usually, there is no longer a large server rented where the hosting is done, but the projects are distributed according to their requirements on services like AWS, Heroku, Vercel, Netlify, Azure etc.
This should not be an advertisement, but I really don’t miss PHP anymore. If a combination of PHP and Strapi makes sense, I can’t answer and you have to find out yourself. Of course, it is possible because Strapi provides a REST or GraphQL-API as output.
I hope I could give you a rough idea.