For smaller things, and I mean single-script stuff, I pretty much always use php-fpm. It’s fast, it scales, it’s low effort to run on a VPS. Shipped a side-project with a couple of PHP scripts a couple of years ago. It works to this day.
php-fpm does work surprisingly well. Though, on the other hand, traditional PHP using php-fpm kinda does follow the CGI model of executing stuff in the document root.
