In my anectodotal experience, PHP is much, much more performant, even before I moved to Frankenphp - which is so much better than Express, it isn't even a joke.

And PHP is much easier to read and handle when the project gets larger. And more secure, as you aren't forced to rely on all these NPM packages (we use Composer, but nothing like the way we used NPM. PHP really comes with almost anything you need built in - and even if you use Laravel its still not a pyramid).

I have read through all the comments, and I really don't get it - I use Node and PHP a lot, and quite a bit of Python. Not to much experience with Go or Rust, but some with Java.

IMO, There is nothing that competes with PHP in speed, security (for web stuff at least), or ease of writing for the web.