As an ex-PHP developer (almost 10 years now), I do not miss it. As a language, it is a scripting language with an okay interpreter. But as an eco-system, it is a hot mess. It has both the worst software developers (and I was one of them) as well as the worst clients (and the cheapest, regardless of geography). It is not a surprise that PHP is running the web. That's because WordPress made sites/e-commerce accessible…
Modern PHP may as well be a new language. But then node came along. It's almost like PHP users couldn't stand a clean ecosystem.
Dude, Node is as broken as PHP. And it starts from having no standard library leading to hell like leftpad and general software supply chain holes that PHP never had in the same quantity.
It isn't clean. Node was just shinier and had more applications to leveraging it for a shiny frontend.