I came across this post from a few years ago discussing pro & con of PHAR in PHP deployments. One of the main issues then was lack of APC support for PHAR. Besides for large scale deployments of widely used tools, I don't see much PHAR use in the wild in end user applications.
Is the era of PHAR over? Besides deployment ease, is there any speed benefit today to using PHAR? Does PHP 7 support caching PHAR?
Update: Today I located the following in the PHP source code, which implies that PHAR is opcode cached: Lines 152-156