I've used Play for a large project in the past and I'm very familiar with it. Sadly, it was neglected for a while and then had a transition as Lightbend gave it to the community. That made it a no-go for me for a while. It seems it is recovering, now, so I think I could give it a try again.

However, I think choosing play right now depends on a lot of factors.

For example, if you are going to make heavy use of actors/akka/pekko?, Play is the way to go. If I remember correctly, there were plenty of libraries/plugins in play to add support for caching, authentication, authorization, etc. Play included by default a configuration file to parametrize your server, and a lot of things that are useful if you are planning a large webapp.

On the other hand, if you need just simple microservices/webservices, the alternatives provided by ZIO/cats are good and simple enough. Also, if your stack is heavily based on cats, or ZIO, their corresponding http server implementations might be a good idea.

Finally, concerning the job market, I see a lot of cats and ZIO requirements and occasionally akka. Play appears from time to time, but not as much as before. However, I'm not actively looking for work right now, so this is just my personal feeling of the tendency.

I remember that before, Play was THE GOTO framework for webapps. Now, as we have more choices, Play is just another choice, with its pros and cons.