I write PHP for a living and every time I look at the JS world, I feel like they're exactly where PHP was 15 years ago, except with 20 times the amount of incomprehensible tooling.
I was writing PHP 15 years ago. It wasn’t a great dev experience and the tooling was awful. JavaScript today has stellar tooling in comparison, and arguably less warts in its standard library than PHP still has today.
I really disliked JavaScript until I read some books that helped me understand what it’s doing under the hood. These days I just don’t have issues with it. Yeah, the ecosystem thrashes a lot and the tooling experience can be bad in regards to that, but otherwise it’s impressive lately. Even without TypeScript, intellisense on regular JS enables extremely streamlined navigation of references and implementations, refactoring, project navigation, tooling integration, etc. Not to mention modern profiling and debugging tools for JS are incredibly easy to use and benefit from.
PHP wasn’t at this stage even 10 years ago. The debugging story was still xdebug and tooling was improving but not great. Composer was painfully slow and buggy - nowhere near as nice as yarn and npm are now.
Yeah JS has problems, but I don’t believe it’s nearly as bad as old PHP.
There are a lot of reasons to like JavaScript as a language and NodeJS as a particular implementation. The standard library (or lack thereof) is absolutely not one of them as things stand today. I'm not even sure what you'd compare between them.
If you meant to say "package available at the other end of npm install" instead of "standard library" I could see that being a different story.
Today, PHP offers a solid OOP experience, good gradual typing, a larger and saner standard library and code loading based on namespaced components.
Now compare today's JS to PHP back in the day. It has the exact same kinds of problems. Except with modern JS, you'll end up adding TypeScript, webpack, Babel and a dozen other tools as well as several hundred megabytes of libraries to paper over all of those problems. But by doing that, you make the build process and the code that ultimately runs in a browser completely incomprehensible and undebuggable for the average developer. And then you start adding even more tooling (source maps that barely work) to try and solve that problem...
I find it really unfair to compare es6 to php 15 years ago, es6 is really cute (the babel/transpiling part is peculiar, I admit it)