The point is that PHP is much more performant and doesn’t waste resources as NodeJS does. While you can run PHP on CGI with a decent bootstrap performance that won’t get people annoyed the same can’t be said of NodeJS. Nowadays people do PHP-FPM which is way faster at scaling up that any NodeJS process manager out there and doesn’t sit wasting resources when a particular application doesn’t have requests.
Who wants to wait 60s for a website to load?
Not saying you should use CGI (who does these days), but saying you could still use it if you want
The point is that PHP is much more performant and doesn’t waste resources as NodeJS does. While you can run PHP on CGI with a decent bootstrap performance that won’t get people annoyed the same can’t be said of NodeJS. Nowadays people do PHP-FPM which is way faster at scaling up that any NodeJS process manager out there and doesn’t sit wasting resources when a particular application doesn’t have requests.