Spending some karma points here, but having worked with many stacks (PHP in the 90s, Java from J(2!)EE to Quarkus and also lots of RoR), the node/bun/whatever JS/TS/[10 other tools that need to be intricately combined] has always repelled me.

Just the fact, that every little piece of software typically relies on hundereds of dependencies, half of which are not maintained and readily break with every major node version has always left me completely incredulous that anyone who ever worked with a language with a half-way decent tool chain and dependency management would ever put up with such a hot mess.

I mean, sure, PHP is certainly far from elegant and to this day suffers from the fact, that it started as a minimal template language (I got into it in the PHP 2 days). Most higher level language features feel a bit bolted on. But that's just as true for JS where everything actually has to be bolted on by the developer on a daily basis (Typescript, JSX preprocessors, etc.pp.) and in terms of effort to just get going and maintaining even a project of medium complexity PHP is still running circles around the node stack.