back in the day, we routinely compiled our own!

"Very few PHP developers ever compiled PHP manually." I had to smile when I read this! Now see here, son. I was compiling PHP when you were crawling around in diapers.

Seriously, I do seem to recall a time -- it had to be well over 10 years ago -- when I went to the PHP website and was informed that there were binaries for Windows but if you were using Linux you were expected to download and compile the source yourself. I honestly don't remember whether distro-specific PHP packages existed, or were a rarity, or maybe as a total noob I was simply unaware of them. But I definitely remember a lot of configure, make, make install, and a lot of dependency hell, and watching a lot of esoteric output pouring forth on my terminal window, while begging the gods to make it work. But oh, what a satisfying feeling of macho accomplishment when it finally worked! As if I really had anything to do with it beyond typing a few commands.

Does anyone else remember those days? It wasn't really that bad. In fact it was sort of fun, in a masochistic way.

Personally I compile PHP manually with just only the extensions I need. Binaries become smaller and in some cases there were, or at least there advantages to link PHP statically.

Anyway, the PGO is to optimize PHP to the limit making your application run faster.

If you do not want to benefit, for instance 7% or 8% of performance improvement of Wordpress, PHP 7 will still run fine if you use your distribution generic binaries.