The reference implementation of PHP, Zend, is objectively not good (blocking I/O) and encourages server side templating, which is basically something you can perfectly do in the client and serve on a CDN at much lower cost (orders of magnitude lower, for processing, memory and transfer).
That being said, doing server side templating in node.js is even worse since it usually wrecks the entire event loop with long lived CPU-bound operations flushing your server performance doing the toilet.
