I take it as a standard because its the approach recommended above all others in the Apache wiki [1] and probably what distros will do at some point as well (RedHat family distros already do this if you don't explicitly opt-in to use mod_php).
Thank you for clarification - makes a lot of sense what they state in that docs
> Why you shouldn't use mod_php with the prefork mpm anymore
>
> mod_php is loaded into every httpd process all the time. Even when httpd is serving static/non php content, that memory is in use.
> mod_php is not thread safe and forces you to stick with the prefork mpm (multi process, no threads), which is the slowest possible configuration
I probably very biased here - I silently imply it's a Nginx in front of Apache in 99.9% cases - so serving static files and long-living connections is not a problem with mpm_prefork [for setups and system administration around me].
[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c...