Since it's inception, the PHP implementation hasn't been threadsafe and since, the way of doing paralellism has been process forking. Later iterations where released with support for long-lived processes and threads but it's still not officially "stable" since again, historically the model of process forking made the ecosystem take for granted non-memory safety.
On the other hand, at least since the last time I was doing Java, paralellism is done via multithreading. Sure, there must be someone doing some else out there, but relevant frameworks like Spring work by making 1 thread by http request.
IMHO the right way of dealing with concurrency is the Node way. But comparing the PHP vs Java y think the PHP way is better. In small-medium scale the Java way is obviously more performant. The problem is when you scale to more instances. The PHP way of immutable processes really makes vertical scalling easier.