Thanks for this. In your image to benchmarks, you don’t mention which version of PHP you are running. PHP 7+ is dramatically faster and in many ways more elegant than PHP 5+.

I also find that there is a different culture involved. While both approaches can produce fully rendered web pages, I notice that junior node.js developers tend to put the heavy lifting on the client side, often using large (and sometimes conflicting) frameworks, slowing initial load times signficantly. The node.js culture also tends to lean towards MongoDB when they would be better served by MySQL.

Both cultures have, in my opinion, relied far too much on frameworks. In the era of HTML5 and CSS3, I find the best pathway to speed and responsiveness is to eschew frameworks except where absolutely necessary.