This has taken a long time, but it's good to see it finally happening. Hopefully the project doesn't put itself in this type of situation again. I don't think many people agreed with the official stance on this, so it will be nice to see the community move forward in agreement now.

Matt Mullenweg wrote an interesting article on this back in 2007.
https://ma.tt/2007/07/on-php/

I think he has really good points there, but WordPress unfortunately can not dictate how PHP handles it's implementation and forking PHP was never an option, so bump WordPress requirements to match those of the official PHP project is the only sensible option IMHO.