The thing that gets me is that JavaScript has all these same problems yet, because everyone is forced to use it, it doesn't get as much hate.
PHP is not trendy, and there's pretty much no hype around any PHP project.
For my start up, I can't see a single reason why we'd use PHP, try to not think of it as me saying PHP is bad, it's just other languages and frameworks offer us more value.
So this also leads to using node.js (for early development and testing).