It think there is a reasonable argument that in PHP and JS there are an equal amount of issues. Inconsistent API, inconsistent language, bad data types, same speed .. just to name a few.
Not that I would not also prefer node over PHP ... But that is mainly because of C/C#/Java familiarity and frontend code reuse/familiarity than anything else.
it's quite a nice language, and for many many cases is certainly fast enough these days.